Faulkner

From Belgium 🇧🇪

From Nigeria 🇳🇬

From Argentina 🇦🇷

From Florida 🇺🇸

From Los Angeles 🇺🇸

From Long Beach, California 🇺🇸

From Havana 🇨🇺

From Miami Beach 🇺🇸

I think they’re in a difficult position with albums receding as the primary way of organizing music consumption in a post-mp3, now-playlist-driven streaming universe. They’re trying to apply the brave new world to an largely antiquated idea that certain artists and record companies are trying to hold on to. I like that streaming now provides enough real-time data to show how people are *actually* listening to music, as opposing to the era when an album would sell millions and people would only listen to that one hot track and skip the rest. That’s great for the singles charts but creates the same problem for the album chart: album “sales” are artificially inflated by either releases with 20-30 tracks (like Drake’s Scorpion) or by one massive hit with a gazillion streams. At least now you can see the data. I remember when Billboard had the stupid rule that songs had to be released as physical singles to chart on the Hot 100. So something as world-dominating as No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak” never charted on the Hot 100, even thought you couldn’t turn on a radio in 1996 without hearing it. (It topped the less-prestigious airplay chart for 16 weeks.) Dumb. Billboard has had a lot of dumb rules. The likely new No. 1:

From Brazil 🇧🇷

0.5 would count to one week, 0.5 would count to the next.

Wow. Yoshi going toe-to-toe with Rafa.

Just gonna leave this here:

It’s both. If you just bought tracks 1 to 10 on Taylor Swift’s latest album and no more, that’s one album unit, or if 10 people bought “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” that’s also one album unit. Basically, they are simply dividing the total cumulative tracks bought from a particular release in a week by 10, no matter if someone buys all of the album tracks or just one.

Not a great day for gender diversity in director shortlists:

From the U.K. 🇬🇧

From South Korea 🇰🇷

I admit I giggled 🤭

From Mexico 🇲🇽

Well she’s broken another record: