Nicki Minaj is sending love to the Barbs this Valentine’s Day.
After a No. 2 debut on the Billboard Hot 100 with her new single “Do We Have A Problem?” with Lil Baby, Nicki took to Twitter on Monday to announce that she doesn’t “need to GO #1. I AM #1. There’s a difference.” In addition to her No. 2 debut on the Hot 100, the track hit No. 1 on on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
“Do y’all not understand how fucking epic you are? They took off all these sales and look,” Nicki wrote while sharing some recent charting victories. “Changed all the rules a few weeks ago chi… and look. I’ll go live to say a few things. Let’s start with how much I fkng love you. So many songs couldn’t do this chi.”
Elaborating on the song’s success after it landed 24.4 million first-week streams and 3.7 million in radio, Nicki explained that the “biggest collaborations & songs with the most radio play and play listing with the same rules couldn’t do it.”
“You guys did it AFTER the rule change,” she wrote on Twitter. “A rap song. No sexual visuals. A rappy rap song. ☺️ I thought it would be top15. Label said top5. #DoWeHaveAProblem 🙏🍾🦄”
She then argued that a change in Billboard’s charting rules—seemingly the one that made it so only 1 digital song sale will be counted per customer per week—was “obviously not a coincidence,” and that “if you guys have all the power a lot of ppl would be out of a job. No more payola.”
Minaj has previously questioned charting results when her 2018 album Queen debuted behind Travis Scott’s Astroworld on the Billboard 200 nearly four years ago, when she attributed Scott’s charting victory to merch and ticket bundles. She said at the time that she spoke with him and that Scott “knows he doesn’t have the #1 album this week.”
“I looked at the numbers the Carters, Kanye, Nas, etc recently did,” she wrote. “Travis sold 200K in his first week of clothes alone. I spoke to him last night & he said he’s been selling clothes b4 the music. Billboard says they’ll change the rules cuz of this, so it should be changed now!”
