Jelly Roll elaborates on 'slimy' race for No. 1 album with Charli XCX: 'It bummed me out a little bit'
This weekend, Jelly Roll appeared on the Pat McAfee Show and shared some surprising details about his behind-the-scenes battle on the charts for a No. 1 album, seemingly calling out hyperpop star Charli XCX's team for alleged chart manipulation.
On Oct. 11, rapper Rod Wave, Jelly Roll, the Nashville-born "I Am Not Okay" singer, and "brat artist" Charli XCX all released albums. Wave's "Last Lap" was competing against Jelly Roll's record "Beautifully Broken," and Charli XCX's remix album "Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat."
All of them were vying for the top slot on the Billboard charts — an honor that went to Jelly Roll on Oct. 26.
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And though the electro-pop album "brat" started the "brat summer" movement and became a major cultural talking point, it never ended up hitting number one on the U.S. charts, neither did it's remixed iteration.
Before the call was made on the number one album, Jelly Roll took to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
"Learned a lot about how slimy the music business is this week, don’t worry yall know I’m going to expose it soon," he said on Oct. 18. "This whole thing is smoke and mirrors yall. All that s*** Russ be talking about is REAL!"
At the time, fans weren't sure what Jelly Roll was referring to, except for that Russ, an independent artist, had spoken out in the past about unethical music industry practices, alleging that some record labels spend money on fake streams.
On the Nov. 8 Pat McAfee appearance, Jelly Roll elaborated on the music industry "smoke and mirrors."
“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,” Jelly Roll said on the show, adding that since he started out as an independent artist, he's a little more connected to the numbers behind the scenes.
When he was in the race for the number one spot, his manager sat him down and told him "it's just real dirty business, just old-school dirty business."
“There was an artist where 'Hits Double Daily' projected that they wouldn’t even be within 50-60,000 albums of me and Rod Wave,” Jelly Roll said. “And then Thursday night, before the Friday count ends, 40,000 albums — (a) third-party aggregated site had that. And you’re looking and you’re just like, ‘Yo, that’s just slimy.'"
Jelly Roll said that Luminate, the analytics platform in charge of counting record sales, ended up rejecting those sales and he nabbed the spot for the number one album. "So that’s the truth,” he said.
"It bummed me out a little bit. Joe Rogan was the one who was giving me the heads up about it. He said, 'Jelly, don't stare at the sun, man. F*** that number one, you're Jelly Roll."
Jelly Roll congratulates Rod Wave for No. 1 album based on streaming
After the chart battle, Rod Wave ended at No. 2 and Charli XCX at No. 3 on the charts.
"As far as I'm concerned, I wanna congratulate Rod Wave on having the number one album," Jelly Roll said. "Because he was streamed more than me and the other two artists almost combined in consumption, but we sold more records..."
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But overall, Jelly Roll is proud of the career-defining statistic: He earned a number one album.
"I wanted to be able to say that we had a number one album without having a party record," he said. "We stayed all the way true to who Jelly Roll is. It's 20-something songs of therapeutic music."
Audrey Gibbs is a music reporter for The Tennessean. You can reach her at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Jelly Roll, Charli XCX and the 'slimy' race to his first No. 1 album