These days the majority of rap album sales are going to come from streams, not traditional sales, as rap's younger audience has wholeheartedly embraced streaming.
So it behooves a rapper to drop an album with lots and lots of tracks because when their fans play the LP on Spotify or Apple Music the more tracks, the more sales.
That's clearly part of the reason Lil Wayne's Carter V checked in at 23 tracks and Drake's Scorpion has 25 tracks.
Like all of Good Music's summer releases, Pusha T's Daytona went the opposite direction and only had seven tracks.
Push ended up moving 77K first week, with more than half of those pure album sales. On the other hand, Scorpion did 732k in its first week with 160K traditional sales and Carter V did 480K with 140K traditional.
In a new interview with Anupa Mistry, Push took a shot at his old pal 25-track Drake for embracing the long album method.
“What really sold me, because [Kanye] knows I’m so anti the idea of everybody putting like 25 tracks on an album to get the streams up and all of that,” he said around the 49-minute mark. “It’s such a poverty way of cheating to me. I’m not into it. So I was like, ‘You know what, you’re right. We need to be totally against everything, and we need to just have a whole other mantra in regard to what we’re doing in this wave.”
Jump to the 49-minute to hear Push apply the shade.