| Representatives of Travis Scott sent a letter to music industry researcher Luminate last week raising questions about its process for ranking best-selling albums. Luminate had disqualified more than 1,000 sales of Days Before Rodeo, a rerelease of the Houston rapper’s 2014 mixtape. Scott’s team hadn’t thought much about the decision days earlier when it appeared they had a sizable lead over pop artist Sabrina Carpenter for the top spot. But Scott’s margin shrank as Luminate added to Carpenter’s total and subtracted from Days Before Rodeo. In the end, Scott’s lead evaporated. Carpenter was on top by a few hundred units. To representatives of Scott, it appeared as if Luminate was playing favorites with Carpenter, who had been anointed by none other than Taylor Swift. Her album was released by Island, a label owned by Universal Music Group, the largest music company on the world. (Scott’s representatives also noted that Nelson Thomas, one of the executives working on the data, previously worked at Island.) Luminate declined to comment on the data or the letter. The skirmish involving Scott and Carpenter reveals one of the least-covered and most unsavory parts of the record business. These kinds of disputes happen every week at Luminate and Penske Media Corp.’s Billboard, which publishes the music charts. Employees at Billboard field complaints and come under pressure campaigns from label heads eager to influence the numbers. But most executives don’t make their lobbying public. Chart position is irrelevant, financially speaking. If you sell 300,000 units of an album, it doesn’t matter if you open second or first. But it matters a lot to label executives (and some artists) who see this as a sign of their stature. (Carpenter was seeking her first No. 1 album in six tries. Scott was angling for his fourth.) Record executives have found ways to manipulate sales figures for decades. They buy stacks of CDs and stash them in order to say their artist opened at No. 1. They target sales at independent retailers, which count for a bit more than the average store. This kind of manipulation is harder in the streaming era, though fraud is a multibillion-dollar problem. The latest tactics in chart management hail from South Korea, where labels release multiple variants of the same album. Fans will buy every version of a new record from BTS or Seventeen – even if the only change is the cover art. It’s a way of expressing support for an act. Korean acts accounted for nine of the 10 bestselling albums of last year but none of the 10 most popular acts on Spotify. Taylor Swift, this country’s foremost student of the Korean music model, has mastered the technique. She rerecorded her first six albums and released them as “Taylor’s version,” breaking all kinds of records. This year, she released multiple versions of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. Swift’s moves have elicited awe from her contemporaries. She is, without a doubt, the most commercially successful pop star this century. She’s also angered many peers who feel she went out of her way to prevent others from opening at No. 1. Swift released new versions of her album the same week as a new record from Billie Eilish, which was more than a month after the initial debut of The Tortured Poet’s Department. Eilish posted her best sales ever but finished second for the week. Fun side note: Eilish’s label is Interscope. Swift’s is Republic. Both are owned by Universal Music, and their two heads — Interscope’s John Janick and Republic’s Monte Lipman — are seen by many as the leading candidates to succeed their CEO, Lucian Grainge. Swift also restocked some CD variants of her album, including a signed edition, just in time for Zach Bryan’s latest record. This was more than two months after her record debuted. The result? Swift remained at No. 1 for 12 consecutive weeks. Both Swift and Universal Music are supporting Carpenter, the Disney Channel ingenue turned pop star. Carpenter’s songs have dominated the charts all summer, and she has three tracks in Spotify’s global top 10. Short n’ Sweet seemed a guarantee to be the No. 1 album. But Scott opted to rerelease his mixtape the same week. The 12-track collection, originally from 2014, was made available to all major platforms for the first time. The deluxe version sold so well that the two acts were in competition for No. 1. Scott is no stranger to chart controversies. He edged fellow rapper Nicki Minaj for the top spot in 2018. Minaj later complained that Scott bundled his album with concert tickets to boost sales. Billboard eventually stopped counting such arrangements in its sales figures. Both Carpenter and Scott used the Korean playbook, releasing multiple versions of their albums. They dropped versions with special tracks, live recordings and remixes. A lot of this activity happened in the last day or two of the week as they saw how close the numbers were. While Carpenter can brag about a No. 1 album, Scott sold more than 360,000 units of a 10-year-old mixtape. They posted the two best weeks of sales for anyone not named Swift or Beyonce. Seems like a win-win. The number of people who pay for some kind of live TV bundle has declined by 4 million so far this year, according to the investment-research firm MoffettNathanson. That includes the likes of YouTube TV. As the cable bundle has collapsed, media executives have comforted themselves by saying that a certain share of the population will continue to pay for their channels. Old people and sports fans, primarily. MoffettNathanson isn’t so sure. “It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no longer any floor, simple because linear video is no longer the only answer for ‘where to get sports.’” Today, you can watch the NFL on Peacock, Paramount+ and Amazon. If cord-cutting continues at the current pace, companies such as Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery are going to be in a world of pain. YouTube passes DisneyAmericans spent more time watching YouTube on their TV sets in July than all of the networks and streaming services owned by Walt Disney, according to Nielsen. That’s the first time YouTube has finished atop the rankings since Nielsen introduced these charts earlier this year. Disney will supplant YouTube now that football is back, but for how long? The No. 1 movie in the world is… Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The long-awaited sequel to the 1988 horror comedy, grossed $110 million in North America this weekend – the second-best opening in September history. It sold $145 million in tickets globally. This movie has already grossed more than the first Beetlejuice and is a big win for Warner Bros. chiefs Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy after a rough summer. Warner Bros. had the biggest movie of the first quarter of the year with Dune 2 and should have the two biggest movies of the third with Beetlejuice Bettlejuice and the second Joker. Is India the new South Korea?India will soon supplant South Korea as the biggest media market in Asia. Investment in programming grew by 12% last year, and India will be the fastest-growing major market in the next few years. Investment in new programming elsewhere in Asia is slowing (like the rest of the world), according to consultancy Media Partners Asia. Companies there spent $15.5 billion on programming last year, a 4% increase from the year before. South Korea and India account for 80% of all spending. But South Korea isn’t expected to grow very much because it is a more mature market. India, by contrast will continue to do so. Most of the money is still spent on programming for traditional TV. But streaming will continue to gain share. Deals, deals, deals | 
