The Weeknd Doesn’t Care That First-Week ‘Dawn FM’ Sales Will Be Impacted By No Physical Editions

First-week sales of a new album is a metric that most major artists place a lot of value on; Having a big debut is good for a project’s chart prospects and moving a lot of copies of an album early gives some major bragging rights. That doesn’t matter to The Weeknd, though, as he declared in a reply to a Twitter thread suggesting that the first-week sales of Dawn FM will be negatively impacted because no physical editions of the album will be available upon its release. (The Weeknd’s online store notes that CD editions of Dawn FM are set to ship on January 28, while vinyl and cassette versions will ship on April 29.)

The thread in question reads, “No physical copies (vinyls, CDs, cassettes) for @theweeknd’s ‘Dawn FM’ will be available in store during release week. Furthermore, no physical copies will be shipped the first week. This will obviously impact first week figures. The reason is likely that The Weeknd pushed the release up. Therefore, physicals aren’t ready for distribution.”

It then points to The Weeknd’s New Year’s Day Instagram post to back up its claim about the supposedly advanced release date. In that post, The Weeknd wrote, “Music can heal and that feels more important than another album rollout. Let’s just drop the whole thing and enjoy it with the people.”

The Weeknd caught wind of this thread and noted in response, “this doesn’t matter to me. what matters is getting to experience the album together with the fans during these times.”

All of that said, Dawn FM shouldn’t have a problem being the biggest new album of the week, as its primary competition for that title may be Gunna’s Drip Season 4.

Dawn FM is out 1/7 via Republic. Pre-order it here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.