Selena Gomez Bought Up Copies of Her Own Album to Get It to #1

Selena Gomez wanted her new album Rare to hit #1 so bad, she bought up copies of it at Walmart, Best Buy and Target. Also known as the three last stores that sell CDs.

Her efforts worked because Rare hit number one on the Billboard charts. As a side note, Billboard has a weird way of calculating rankings now.

The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units. Units comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA).

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In total, Rare’s start of 112,000 units was powered by nearly 56,000 in SEA units (equating to 79.3 million on-demand streams for album’s tracks), just under 53,000 in album sales, and a little over 3,000 in TEA units.

Only 53,000 people bought her cd. How many did Gomez buy, 5000?

Gomez called herself “desperate” for doing so, but no one’s gonna remember that you juiced the sales. In her Instagram stories, she had her friends go out and buy the albums too.

She also went on Instagram stories to beg for streams.

This is sad. Just like Justin Bieber taking out billboards trying to get people to stream “Yummy” or asking fans to stream it while they sleep. It’s pretty interesting all the ways artists are trying to game Billboard now that Billboard has a new way of counting streams towards album sales.

Ironically, Rare is supposed to be a really good album from her. The songs I’ve heard sound good, so if it takes Gomez begging people to listen to her songs, well, I’m all for good music being discovered.