Earlier this month, on the heels of Frank Ocean's historic g'announcement that he's way into dudes, his new record channel ORANGE was released to a ton of fanfare and super big record sales. In the first week, this apricot-coated banger crept its way onto the playlists of you and me and everyone we know, selling a whopping 131,000 copies in seven days, and debuting at #2 on the Billboard 200. Not bad for an openly gay kid with synesthesia.But why didn't he make it to number one? Modern-day Ike Turner Chris Brown held that spot with 135,000 records sold, but I'm gonna go on the record and claim that Ocean definitely sold more records - potentially up to 15,000 more than the 131K Billboard has channel ORANGE clocked at. So what's the deal?Turns out that corporate monolith Amazon could be at fault. When Def Jam, Ocean's label, pulled a smart marketing move and released the record digitally the week before release, Amazon started selling the same product for $2.99, which is less than my morning orange juice.Here's the kicker: any sales on Amazon don't count towards - you guessed it - Ocean's Billboard rating. In case you missed this little story, back when Gaga's Born This Way was priced at 99 cents on Amazon to fire up its first week, Billboard decided to exclude first-month sales of titles sold for less than $3.49 from registering on their charts.Shadowy sources claim that Frank Ocean could have sold up to 15,000 records through Amazon that weren't charted on his Billboard score. That would have placed him at 146,000 records sold in the first week, over 10,000 more than Chris Brown.Like an angry teenager, Amazon threw this record up so cheaply out of spite, pissed as fuck at the iTunes exclusive of a number one record. According to a major-label sales exec, Amazon "punished the artist and the label in a pretty sneaky and clever way. They are also definitely sending a message to other labels that giving iTunes an exclusive will have consequences."It certainly sends a message to me: the next time I want to buy a record on iTunes, I'm going to check Amazon first to see if it's cheaper. So is Amazon being a vindictive jerknut, or raising a torch against Apple's forthcoming ownership of everything in your entire world? Or do they just hate the male gaze?Either way it doesn't matter, because the Billboard 200 is about as relevant to good music as whatever the fuck is on Mitt Romney's iPod. I just want to see this record get its due, because it's really, really good.@b_shap
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