Nicki Minaj & Travis Scott: Astroworld Inflated?
It's Thanksgiving. Your family has come from all over to spend the holiday together; your parents have invited every relative you can think of, even the old whiny one. You know them because they alway sit next to you and criticize everything about your generation. They say you don't work hard compared to them when they were young. They walked thousands of miles to get to school everyday. They worked four jobs, while also maintaining a 4.0 GPA and getting three sports scholarships. It sounds ridiculous, right? Well that's what Nicki Minaj has sounded like for the past weeks in interviews with the likes of Tidal and Genius. The first week was mainly about Cardi B (see A RatedR View of Nicki Minaj vs. Cardi B), while this past week, her focus has seemingly shifted to Travis Scott and his latest release, Astroworld. As much as it may annoy some to hear her talk about other artists while harkening back to a not to distant past, I believe that she can be right: let me explain.
The general media and most music news sources will cite that Nicki Minaj's latest album, Queen, is a flop, only opening at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 200 with only 150 000 album equivalent sales. Many will use other albums to compare it to, including her own releases such as Pink Friday's number 2 start, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded's start at number 1 and The Pinkprint's number 2 start. While that doesn't seem telling - just revealing that Nicki begins at either number one or two, what's important is the number of sales, which, when organized by order of release, they come to 375 000, 253 000, 244 000 and finally 185 000 sales. These numbers have no real relation to what Queen does today due to the streaming and illegal streaming. That argument is then rebuffed with comparing it to Travis Scott's Astroworld, the album that held the number 1 spot at the release of Nicki's latest endeavor and sold 537k. This is where the anger is understandable.
In a world in which streaming is how music is consumed and social media is extremely important to any brand, in comes Travis Scott. Scott's career has been seen as one of the gem's of the underground who grew to mainstream success through tracks such as 'Antidote' and 'Goosebumps'. But his albums and mixtapes before Astroworld never touched a hundred thousand sales in the first week - so how did it quintuple the span of eight months? It isn't by a miraculous addition of a star studded lineup or by the fact that he'd gotten exponentially better at his craft. It's Kylie Jenner. His girlfriend and mother of his baby Stormy has had such an impact on sales through promotion to her 113 million followers on Instagram alone. Her posts preceding the release of the album, including the one promoting her going on tour with him, have racked up millions of likes and hundreds of thousands of comments; the full insights only known by her camp. Travis Scott is a rapper who is being helped by a social media mogul.
What seems to be the worst, and the most controversial, aspect of this entire situation is the fact that Kylie Jenner posted on her page to shop for Travis Scott hoodies the day before the release of the list. Problem? For the sale of every hoodie, there's an album and the code to buy tour tickets early. Yet, one album sale is equivalent to 1500 song streams; it's not hard for any of her fans to therefore buy one or two hoodies and account for 3000 streams. That includes if the person already bought the album, so at that point, the person might have three or four album depending on the amount of hoodies this person bought. It's playing the system at its best. As much as the music companies and record labels say that they don't count those as sales, it'd be hard to believe that they wouldn't count something that heightens their prestige and revenue.
End game. This entire situation is sketchy. It seems like the media has it out for Nicki Minaj. No one stays at the top forever. They'll throw Cardi and Travis against her, but I feel as if Nicki is resilient enough to make it through. She is arguably one of the best female MC's of all-time and one of the highest earning artists of her era. She's already won that battle. When it comes to the discussion, I'm rooting for Minaj. She's proven and smart. All we can do is hope that the odds aren't stacked to hard up against her.