There Are No Opening Week Numbers For Kanye West's 'Donda 2'

by HHL JT

Kanye West's Donda 2 dropped on February 23, when Ye made the project available on a free-standing stem player you had to buy from him for a couple of hundred bucks.

Since then, there has been no tracking of how well the album has been selling, and there won't be.

According to Billboard, they aren't counting Donda 2 for their charts because the stem/Donda package counts as a merch bundle, and is thus not chart eligible.

Kanye has claimed he sold at least 40,000 stem players.  Such sales would have grossed him $8 million -- a lot more than he would have made if he released the album on traditional platforms.

But that claim hasn't been verified by Billboard or anyone else.

Billboard is monitoring the situation and may include stem packages in their future charts.

Since the Stem Player is a fairly new concept, however, people familiar with the matter from both Billboard and MRC say they plan to continue to monitor its evolution as it relates to chart eligibility.