Jelly Roll landed his first No. 1 album earlier this year with Beautifully Broken. As Stereogum notes, it was apparently a close race between Jelly Roll and Charli XCX’s Brat. Ultimately, Brat ended up at No. 3 that week, behind Rod Wave’s Last Lap.
That apparently wasn’t for a lack of trying from Charli’s camp, though: Jelly Roll appeared on ESPN’s Pat McAfee Show recently, and while he didn’t mention Charli directly, he seemed to accuse her team of attempting to rig sales numbers of get Brat to No. 1. He said:
“I won’t say the artist’s name because I know that a lot of artists are disconnected from what’s happening in the business. Because I became as an independent artist the same way that y’all became as an independent media show, we’re a little more hands-on with what’s happening behind the scenes. So I’m kinda keeping up with stuff, and my manager just sits me down. He goes, ‘Look man, I didn’t want you to get in a situation where you was aware what was happening when you start getting in these conversations for No. 1 albums because it’s just real dirty business, like old-school dirty business.’
And there was an artist where Hits Double Daily [sic] projected that they wasn’t even gonna be within 50 [or] 60,000 albums of me and Rod Wave. And then Thursday night, before the Friday count ends, 40,000 albums [snaps] — third-party aggregated site has that. And you’re looking and you’re just like, ‘Yo, that’s just… slimy.’ Now Luminate, who is in charge of counting record sales, rejected these sales, which is how I ended up with the No. 1 album, so that’s the truth.
And here’s the real truth, while we’re doing inside baseball: As far as I’m concerned, I wanna congratulate Rod Wave on having the No. 1 album because he was streamed more than me and the other two artists almost combined in consumption that first week. But we sold more records because we still got a traditional fan base that’ll go to Walmart, Target, you know what I mean? I see so much in it that it made me look at it different. It bummed me out a little bit.”
