Travis Scott came within a few hundred units of taking a ten-year-old project to the top of the charts, in a nail-bitingly close race.
Scott’s Days Before Rodeo, originally released for free in 2014 but seeing its commercial release a decade later, is number two on the new Billboard 200 chart, behind Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet.
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The race was so close — Carpenter ended up with 362,000 album equivalent units, while Scott had a little over 361,000 — that data provider Luminate reportedly delayed the release of the winner in order to make sure the final numbers were correct.
All but about 30,000 of Scott’s tally came from album sales, nearly all of which were digital downloads. This was sparked by Scott offering eight different versions of the project, with a wide variety of bonus tracks and remixes. Many of the variants were available exclusively through his webstore. The “Sicko Mode” rapper’s 300,000 digital downloads gave him the biggest download sales week of any album released in 2024.
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Overall, Days Before Rodeo had the fourth-biggest week of any 2024 project, and the biggest first week of any Hip Hop album released this year.
The fight for the top spot between Scott and Carpenter got contentious, with Carpenter seemingly responding directly to Scott’s decision to release the variant versions of his album.
A number of the variants were released on August 30. The move did not go unnoticed by Carpenter who wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “This is for Nicki,” a reference to Scott beating out Nicki Minaj to number one in 2018 with his Astroworld album.
Minaj then returned the love to the pop star, saying on Instagram Live: “Shout out Sabrina Carpenter, shout out all the Sabrina Carpenter fans.”
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Minaj was famously beaten to the top of the Billboard 200 in 2018 by Scott with her not taking second place well, accusing the “Goosebumps” rapper of gaming the system with his bundle offers.
On Queen Radio, she ranted: “What we’re not gonna do is have that Auto-Tune man selling fucking sweaters. Telling you he sold half a million albums, because he fucking didn’t. You stupid fuck. You got your fucking homeboy talking for you and you got your girlfriend selling tour passes. Stop it. Knock it the fuck off.”
