Jelly Roll claims unnamed artist aggregated 40,000 fake album sales in bid for Number One: “That’s just slimey”

nme.com:

Jelly Roll has claimed that an unnamed artist collected 40,000 fake album sales in an attempt to reach Number One on the charts.The singer and rapper appeared as a guest on The Pat McAfee Show and discussed how his 10th studio album ‘Beautifully Broken’ debuted at Number One on the US Billboard 200 chart with 161,000 album-equivalent units, including 114,000 pure album sales.According to Jelly Roll, there was allegedly another artist who was releasing their album as the same time as his which had not been projected to be within a specific number of sales for the top spot on the charts.

However, the day before the end of the sales count, the artist ended up selling close to the sales number for the top spot on the charts.The ‘Wild Ones’ rapper shared that he had spoken to his manager about the chart race and was told to not get caught up on the “dirty” side of the music business.“There was an artist that looked like HITS Daily Double projected they wasn’t even gonna be within 50-60,000 albums of me and Rod Wave,” said Jelly Roll. “And then Thursday night, before the Friday count ends, 40,000 albums [from a] third-party aggregated site.