Rihanna's ANTI has had a weird first week of sales. Dropping Wednesday evening on Tidal (to compete with an unfortunate leak), it had under 48 hours left in the sales week to do numbers, and even then they were stream-only (outside of 460 copies that somehow managed to trickle through early). As a result, it debuted at #27 on the charts.
On Friday, the album was officially uploaded to iTunes and one million downloads of the LP were given away to Tidal subscribers. While the freebies were counted by the RIAA towards a platinum plaque, they will not figure into Rih's second week sales, which will instead factor in streams and iTunes purchases (physicals haven't made their way out yet). As of now, the singer is projected to sell 95-105,000 in pure sales, and 120-130,000 with streams, which could be enough to get her to number 1 this time around.
The real success story here is Kevin Gates, whose debut album, Islah, was released Friday, and is looking to do 75-80,000, (80-85,000 with streams) its first week. The HDD projections have him matching the sales of pop sensation Sia, who released her new album the same day.
Gates' is known to have a very loyal regional following, and the iTunes release of his 2014 mixtape, Luca Brasi 2 (which was also available for free) did over 20k in its first week, so Kevin's numbers shouldn't be all that surprising, though they remain impressive.
