Figuring out how the Billboard charts work is a dicey business even in the best of times. And with new methods of consuming music and the attendant changes to the charts' formulas that go along with that, it can seem like a fool's game to get a handle on how exactly sales and popularity are quantified these days.
That said, there is one part of how things work that is easy to understand. When it comes to the weekly album chart, properly known as the Billboard 200, the time period it reflects remains consistent. Since global release dates changed from Tuesday to Friday in 2015, Billboard counts a week's worth of sales as being from Friday (the day projects are generally released) to the following Thursday.
So, a week is a week is a week. Friday through Thursday. Easy enough, right? Well, not for Chris Brown.
The singer hopped on Instagram on Thursday to express his dismay that his new album Heartbreak on a Full Moon would only have three days of sales to count towards its inaugural week on the chart. "DONT UNDERSTAND how that is," he exclaimed.
The reason for the short week is simple enough: instead of releasing the album on a Friday—the global release date—Chris put it out on Halloween, a Tuesday. Thus, he only has Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday sales to determine his position on the charts for the album's first week. It has nothing to with Billboard, or the RIAA, but the day he chose to put out his album.
To make Brown's confusion even more confusing, Brown posted detailed instructions for his fans on how to consume the album the day before its release. Emphasized repeatedly in the message? That Chris' fans only had three days to help the album make the charts. "We only have 3 days tracking after its release for its debut on the Billboard 200," read one part. Later on, it's reiterated: "we only have 3 days to make up for a full tracking week."
Something else that confused Breezy was his platinum certifications. He wondered about the "9 platinum plaques RIAA Just dropped out of the sky this year [sic]" and seemed to indicate that getting 10 platinum plaques would give him a diamond certification.
Brown has indeed been issued nine platinum certifications this year for solo singles (and two more for featured appearances). However, the rare and vaunted diamond certification is for 10 million sales or album equivalent units of either a single or an album. Having 10 separate platinum singles does not, as Brown implies, give you a diamond album, even if all of those songs are from the same project. Brown's last album before HBOAFM, 2015's Royalty, was certified gold in March, 2016. It has not yet gone platinum.
