The first week of sales after an album's release can be a crucial measurement of the record's success, and artists have been attempting all kinds of methods to drum up sales. No longer do we live in a world where 2-3 singles and a press junket will generate sales, now a days artists have to come up with some crazy scheme, or simply just drop their album completely out of the blue.
Nicki Minaj isn't above all of that either. According to Hip-Hop N More, Nicki will be using a tried and true method to get people to purchase her album early. An e-mail sent to her fans state that every pair of tickets purchased for Nicki's upcoming "NICKIHNDRXX" tour with Future will earn her fans a single copy of her upcoming album, Queen.
Just doing some rudimentary math, this deal could turn out very lucrative for Nicki. Her tour, which starts in September, is massive, with her hitting 50 different shows in numerous countries. Even on a low estimate of the arenas she's performing in holding a max of 1000 people each, if each pair of seats gets an album in return, she'll have already sold 25,000 copies of Queen before it even drops.
Nicki isn't the first artist to bundle their album with their concert sales. Pop artist P!nk did a similar strategy with her 2017 album Beautiful Trauma, and two thirds of her 384k first week album sales came from fans buying tickets to her tour. Of course, if Nicki wanted to go platinum right way she could always sell a million copies of her album to Samsung like Jay Z did.