Sales of the star’s much-delayed album look dire on paper – but in a world of streaming,free downloads and blockbuster tours, that may not matter any moreWhatever way you slice it, and the release of Anti,Rihanna’s eighth studio album, has been a shambles. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it has been a catastrophe, and especially as the recorded music industry finds itself in the middle of a huge recalibration of what does and what doesn’t count as success.
The shambolic fraction of it relates to precisely how it was released. It’s a yawning three years since Apologetic,breaking the singer’s near-perfect hurry of a current album a year since Music of the Sun in 2005 (excluding that dinky anomaly when there was no current album in 2008). For the first time in her career she’s taken a substantial break between records and, perhaps wary of jumping back on to the promotional treadmill, or she and her team could be accused of overthinking things.
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Source: theguardian.com