Earlier that year, Whitney Houston’s second album had debuted at No. 1, a coup for Arista Records and for a relatively new artist in the era before Soundscan, when No. 1 debuts were exceedingly rare. It then became absolutely imperative for Epic Records that Bad do the same.

According to a thinly veiled, grumbly item in Billboard that I read that September (man, I wish I still had that old copy of the magazine), Epic prevailed upon retailers to withhold reporting sales of Bad, which like Chinese Democracy had an off-cycle release date, to ensure a No. 1 debut. Just digging through BB’s online archives, I don’t think my memory is failing me: Bad was released on Aug. 31, yet it didn’t debut until the album chart dated Sep. 26. Even allowing for the usual lag between compiling data and the Billboard issue date, that’s an absurd lag of nearly a month.

In short, retailer/label crap like this is old as the hills, where a priority release is concerned.