SOUNDSCAN SCREW-UP BELTS BIBLE

Oh, dear—the Bible is having a doozy of a week. First its attempt to brand a new music festival has devolved into the “Nightmare at Jones Beach,” filling John Amato’s sand pail with red ink. Now a SoundScan screw-up has given one of its vaunted charts a black eye.

Remember how Lana Del Rey had the second-highest SoundScan single debut of 2015 with “High by the Beach,” selling a reported 248k and bowing at #7 on the Billboard Hot 100? Yeah, funny story. Turns out that SoundScan fed them some bad data, and that after the reprocessing of the numbers it turned out Del Rey had actually moved 67k—good for #51 on the chart. The story, now getting mad media pickup, is the kind of fuck-up nobody would want to have to explain to an artist.

Let us all light a candle and say a prayer for the Bible—we sure hope the festival doesn’t get hit by a tsunami as well. Though they could probably use the insurance money.