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Last year Billboard changed the way it tallies its Hot 100 chart to include streams from services like Spotify and YouTube, causing some immediate and fairly significant shakeups. Taylor Swift, who had just released her album Red, benefitted immensely as her fans’ digital-native listening habits were finally acknowledged, and overnight a half dozen songs from the album—most of which weren’t being officially promoted as singles—popped up on the chart.
Pop music thrives on spectacle, and Drake’s oeuvre, hip-hop, is arguably even more about it. And now that selling a million copies of an album its first week out—large-scale rappers’ boast of choice for years before the record industry’s implosion—is beyond even the biggest rap artist’s reach, total album domination over the pop charts may become the new standard of industry success. If it is, charting 12 songs simultaneously—or 80 percent of the album’s content—will be the bar other pop rappers will need to clear.
