The first new music Friday of 2022 gave us both The Weeknd’s Dawn FM and Gunna’s DS4EVER – two equally amazing and unique projects that have been racking up the numbers across streaming platforms since their arrival.
Initially, it seemed as though the Toronto-born singer would be taking the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s album chart, but ultimately, Wunna came out on top, surprising a lot of fans following The Weeknd’s massive success with his last project.
As HipHop Lately reports, March 2020’s After Hours had a 444K opening week, while Dawn FM amassed just 148K. Last night, Billboard issued a statement revealing that they had run into a delay after encountering some “suspicious” sales numbers.
“…In partnership with Billboard, data deemed suspicious and unverifiable is disqualified prior to the final calculation. This can cause delays in publishing,” a quote from the platform shared by @chartdata on Twitter reports.
DJ Akademiks uploaded a screenshot of the tweet to his Instagram page, captioning it, “[why] Billboard playing wit my mans The Weeknd like [he] was faking sales or [something]?”
First-week sales projections predicted that the Starboy artist would move approximately 150K – 170K, although Abel Tesfaye made it clear that he’s not concerned with the numerical success of Dawn FM. When discussing the fact that no physical copies of his new record would be made available during release week, he explained himself saying, “this doesn’t matter to me.”
“What matters is getting to experience the album together with the fans during these times,” he continued.
Recently, the 31-year-old hinted that we’re in midst of a “new trilogy,” – read more about that here, and let us know what you think The Weeknd’s next era will bring in the comments.
[Via]