Frank Ocean 's recent coming out could have a huge impact on sales for his forthcoming album 'Channel Orange', out on Def Jam. The LP hits the Billboard charts in the US this weekend, and Keith Caulfield, the organisation's associate direct of charts, thinks that the note he posted on his Tumblr admitting that the first person he loved was a man at 19 could prove a key commercial boost.
"American Idol" alum Adam Lambert is one of the most recent gay pop stars to have a No.1 album, but things work differently on the urban-music front," Caulfield said to MTV. "For Frank, it's different. He's in the RnB and hip-hop world, and he's relatively under the radar to most people, but this is important, especially in light of Anderson Cooper."
The CNN anchor was another to come out recently, a hugely high profile admission that Caulfield says reaped benefits that Ocean may see too. "On one hand, it could give him visibility that he didn't have before, because suddenly people are writing about him and headlines with his name are coming across people's Facebook and Twitter dashboard and they're wondering, 'Who is this dude? Let me read about him, let me listen to his music, I've never heard of him before now,' so it could help. No one in RnB music who's that huge, or could be huge, has ever been frank, so to speak, about their sexuality in this way."