Frank Ocean has been all over the news lately. The Odd Future alum released his long awaited project, Blonde, last week to critical acclaim and dropped the visual album, Endless, a few days before.
According to Music Business Worldwide, as of Thursday, August 25, Blonde has already been illegally downloaded almost a million times—753,849 times to be exact. MUSO, a global tech company that provides content protection, data analytics and piracy audience reconnection solutions made the tedious calculations.
Similarly, Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo project was downloaded half a million times on BitTorrent while he tinkered with perfecting the final product as it sat exclusively on TIDAL. Frank’s release of Endless and Blonde has been shrouded in controversy and pettiness. After teasing fans for over a year with the promise to release his next album (presumed to be titled Boys Don’t Cry), he finally dropped his Endless on Apple Music, August 19, marking the Los Angeles singer’s last contractual album with his former label Def Jam. He planned on dropping Blonde the next day, independently on his own imprint Boys Don’t Cry, which would prevent the label from getting a huge cut. Consequently, Universal Music Group, home to Def Jam, made a call to end all future exclusivity deals with music platforms such as Apple Music, TIDAL and Spotify.
In other news, Endless has also been deemed “ineligible” for the Billboard charts. Because fans can only stream Endless in its 45-minute entirety on Apple Music, it’s impossible to listen to individual tracks or purchase the album. This becomes problematic based on the way music streaming is monitored. Album rankings are judged by how many times songs are streamed—1,500 streams equals one unit and albums are sorted by number of units. In addition, the industry takes album sales into consideration, which is something Endless obviously lacks. Based on the way Blonde is being received, Franky will be just fine.
By Kyle Eustice for RAPstation.com
