Drake has said that he believes Billboard “fixed” the charts following the success of his album ‘Scorpion’, in 2018.
At the time, the Canadian rapper’s album broke multiple streaming records and he became the first artist to reach over 50 billion streams across music platforms. It also topped the Billboard 200.
Explaining his theory to DJ Akademiks, Drake said that the move was done in an effort to boost other artists.
Prior to the week that ‘Scorpion’ was released, Billboard counted 1,500 streams equal to a single album sale.
From the next week, they implemented two different ratios to determine the value of a stream, meaning there was a disparity in the value between a song streamed by a “paying subscriber” to a platform like Apple Music and Spotify versus that of a “free user”.
Billboard is yet to comment on the rapper’s claims.
