Want your album to be in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200? Sell it for cheap. It's a ploy that helped accelerate the sales of the Frozen soundtrack earlier this summer and helped Luke Bryan get back into the Top 10, following a sale on digital copies of the album on iTunes. Bob Marley and The Wailers is the newest act to reap the awards of a discount as his Legend is about to crack the Top 10 for the first time in its history according to Rolling Stone.
Google Play offered the album for 99 cents last week, a price enticing enough to get more buyers to dish out. And enough buyers for the album to crack the Top 10 for that matter.
It's somewhat of an injustice however: This isn't the first album that Google Play has offered an album at such a cut rate price however. The site offered Katy Perry's Prism for the same price last year, as Amazon had offered Lady Gaga's Born This Way for the same, however Billboard and Nielsen Soundscan enacted rules to prevent such discounts from swaying final sales numbers, labeling it an unfair advantage. As Legend is more than 30 years old it found a loophole to squeeze by the rule and get ranked.
Legend hasn't exactly been hurting for sales of the last three decades. The greatest hits compilation has gone platinum 11 times and has spent more than 300 weeks within the Billboard 200...but it's never broken into the Top 10. In fact, it would be the first time since 1976 that Marley has had a Billboard Top 10 album. We won't know until Wednesday how far up the chart he managed to get but we're not betting on him to beat out Maroon 5. Might make things interesting however.
