To the delight of hip-hop fans (and the chagrin of middle-school teachers) everywhere, the wildly popular Atlanta rapper Playboi Carti dropped his long-awaited third album, simply titled Music, last week—his first official project since 2020’s Whole Lotta Red. But after five years of waiting, some are speculating if prior merchandise presales may have impacted the release’s timeline.
First, in September, the rapper shared a link to preorder his yet-to-be-completed album off of his official website, which featured buyable “box sets” that included simple black logo tees, hoodies, and baseball hats and some sort of physical copy of the record, the format of which fans debated on Reddit. By late December, Carti fans received their “most exciting development in weeks” when, per a report in HotNewHipHop, they noticed that there had been a “ready to ship” status update to the merch bundles for sale on the artist’s website. Merch bundles—an umbrella term that involves purchasing a collection of items, such as a piece of wearable merchandise that comes with a physical or digital copy of a record—are a crucial part of how artists make money on album sales, especially in the streaming era. They are also a contentious component of how music charts such as Billboard quantify sales: If a fan just wants to buy a merch hoodie but it also happens to come with a digital download of an album (which they may or may not ever listen to, especially if they already subscribe to a streaming service), should it count towards the album’s sales?
And as Rolling Stone’s Jeff Ihaza reported earlier this month, when Carti shared official pre-order information for I Am Music on his website last fall, the point-of-sale page for new merch as well as physical copies of the record contained a clause stating the albums would ship no later than six months from September 12, 2024, making March 12 the final date before Carti would have to start issuing refunds. As of March 11, fans started receiving notifications that their merch bundles had shipped. Then, on March 12, Spotify teased on its official channels that the album would drop two days later—on March 14.
Over the weekend, Playboi Carti briefly wore a version of his album’s new merch (a simple white T-shirt printed with the phrase, “I AM MUSIC”) during his rollicking Rolling Loud Cali set, though he eventually stripped down to a white ribbed logo tank by Chrome Hearts. Two days later, the rapper expressed his frustration over a report circulating on X saying that the presold merch bundles—though they technically included a copy of the album—may not count towards the album’s projected sales: “IT IS ODD,” Carti posted in response. Nonetheless, as of Friday, Billboard is projecting positive outcomes for Music’s quantifiable success; the album already earned Carti his first-ever No. 1 on the Australian ARIA Albums Chart. As a consumer good, the business of merch is still booming.
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