Travis Scott Team Questions ‘Integrity’ of U.S. Album Chart: Not ‘About Travis vs. Sabrina’
Travis Scott’s team is disputing the recent placement of his mixtape Days Before Rodeo behind Sabrina Carpenter’s Short ‘n Sweet on the Billboard 200, calling Billboard and Luminate’s sale measurement “unreliable and incomplete.” They allege that nearly 1,300 units sold ahead of the cutoff were not counted toward the first week’s sales.
The letter, sent by an unnamed rep at Cactus Jack Records and Scott’s retailer to Luminate — the data company that powers the charts — claims that Scott (who was recorded to have just over 361,000 sales) would have had just enough units to beat Carpenter’s 362,000 sales to Number One.
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“This was never about Travis versus Sabrina — it’s about the integrity of the process and the questionable tactics used in U.S. charting,” a rep for Travis Scott tells Rolling Stone. “This could happen to any artist.”
In the lengthy letter, the Cactus Jack rep accused the Billboard 200 chart process of “arbitrary discarding of verified sales from trusted providers,” using “archaic indie retail weighting process[es],” and making decisions “inconsistent with historical precedent.” It also called out an employee at Luminate for previously working at Carpenter’s Island Records.
“With a race so close — within 1k units — we implore the organization tasked with fairly and transparently reporting data to give one final consideration to this set of facts and reconsider your position on counting the verified 1,291 units,” read the letter.
A spokesperson for Billboard at PMC, Rolling Stone‘s parent company, tells Rolling Stone that Billboard “stand[s] behind our chart data and methodology.”
The letter detailed an alleged conversation with Tommy Stalknecht, CEO of Single, which runs Shopify, about an “extremely high volume of orders” following the release of a deluxe version at 11:20 p.m. before the sales cutoff of midnight.
In screenshots, reviewed but not verified by Rolling Stone, Stalknecht claims that nearly 1,300 units were sold in the last 15 minutes of the hour, which would’ve landed Scott in the Number One slot. The letter claims Luminate had not accepted the sales in time. At the time, the rep who sent a letter said in texts that those sales were not “worth the headache” of fighting for them to be added.
Stalknecht declined to comment, telling Rolling Stone, “We do not comment on our customer’s business.”
Over the weekend, when the numbers were being counted, the letter claims Scott’s team reached out to Luminate numerous times about adding the units, and the company seemingly “did not respond nor acknowledge receipt of data.” The letter claims that they faced “this exact same issue” when Scott released Utopia in 2023, which led to Luminate adding back a certain number of sales. “Everyone was fully in the dark from Luminate all weekend,” read the letter.
A Luminate rep did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment about the letter, though they confirmed to Vulture, who first reported the story, that the company received a letter from a label disputing the chart. “We are confident that our numbers are correct in accordance with our processes and methodology,” Luminate told the outlet.
The letter also questioned Luminate’s “indie retail ‘weighting,'” which they say gave Carpenter a push over Scott this week, and which offers “no option” for transparency. “It clearly bumped Sabrina’s final number of units just above Travis by almost the exact amount of units we erroneously ‘lost’ that would have counted toward week 1,” read the letter.
Lastly, the letter mentioned an employee at Luminate, whose LinkedIn profile shows they worked at Sabrina’s label Island Records within the last three years, as they called into question the employee’s “objectivity.”
“This is especially concerning considering he had a legitimate and proven crossover with her signing to Island at the top of 2021 while he was still employed by the company (which lasted until May 2021),” read the letter, which added that “logic would dictate” the employee “has a personal incentive to encourage the artist signed to his previous employer while under his tenure to ‘win’ the race this week.”
Reps for Sabrina Carpenter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This article was updated at 9:05 p.m. ET on Sept. 6 to include a statement from Billboard.
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