Drake's album Views will go Gold the moment it is released, which should be either tonight or sometime tomorrow.
That's because earlier this year The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) updated their certification rubrics to include “on-demand song and video streams." Now 1,500 on-demand audio and/or video song streams equals one album sale.
According to Forbes, those streams are applied retroactively for singles that were released before their album drops.
Views tracks 'One Dance' and 'Pop Style' have already amassed 85 million total streams on YouTube and services like Spotify. But those are just the appetizers. 'Hotline Bling' -- which is listed as a 20th "bonus track" on Drake's fourth album -- has almost 1.1 billion streams on just Youtube and Spotify.
If you figure Drake is going in with 1.2 billion total streams, that amounts to 800,000 immediate album sales of Views.
So if Forbes is correct about the RIAA counting retroactively, Views should go platinum (one million) in its first few hours, and should become the biggest selling album in the Hip Hop space since 2013 in less than a week.
However there is one caveat. Forbes reports that Billboard won't take any streams that occured before release into consideration for their album chart
So if Drake wants to top Beyonce on the charts, he'll have to do that the old fashion way. (And we suspect that he will.)