These are the smartest rappers 😳🧠 Like Travis Scott finding a loophole to inflate his album sales for Astroworld by selling merch bundles that came with a free copy of the album, sparking beef with Nicki Minaj, and fans think he waited until Billboard allowed bundles again to drop Utopia Did you know Travis was doing this? 👇 #travisscott #nickiminaj #rap #rappers #fyp

These are the smartest rappers, starting with Travis Scott, who found a loophole to make himself seem bigger than he really is. Huh? Back in 2018, after he dropped his album "Astroworld," Travis released a brand new limited edition piece of merch every single day, and every purchase came bundled with a free copy of the album, so every time someone purchased a t-shirt or anything from the site, it counted as an album sale. Basically, inflating his number so "Astroworld" would go number one. Normally, it takes about 1,500 streams to count as just one album sale, but with this strategy, one person buying merch counted as a full sale. A lot of people were upset about this, because around that same time, Nicki Minaj also dropped an album, and she was furious when hers landed at number two, because of what Travis was doing. I felt like I wanted to punch him in his face. It's just that when you have a number two album to someone who's selling shirts and merch, it feels like someone is playing a game as opposed to just selling music. After this, more and more artists started selling bundles to boost their numbers, including massive stars like Taylor Swift. It got to the point where Billboard actually banned merch bundles from counting toward album sale. But that didn't last long, because in 2023, they started counting them again, and that same year, after not dropping an album since "Astroworld" in 2018, Travis released Utopia, along with a ton of bundles, leading some people to think he strategically waited for the band to live. But Travis didn't actually invent this strategy. Prince was doing it all the way back in 2004, when he started giving out free copies of his album whenever someone bought his concert tickets.