Originally Posted by JackieBlue

If I understood the article correctly, Billboard won't be approving any new bundle deals. So even if Jon were to announce new dates, and start selling tickets today, they wouldn't be counted.

It looks like only existing offers, i.e., those that had already been approved before the decision was made, will be allowed to count ticket and/or merch bundles towards chart sales. And of those existing offers, only the sales prior to Oct 8 can be included.

That might explain why Billboard yanked the first report, and changed the Oct 2 date to TBA so fast. If artists had existing approved deals in place, with the understanding that an Oct 2 release would be within the parameters, they probably went through the roof when they read that only records released prior to Oct 2 would be under the old guidelines. Especially if some of them had moved up previously announced release dates, like Jon did, perhaps just to get in under the wire.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't see why Jon (or the label) would change a date that had already been moved out from May 15 to Oct 30, just to pull the release in by less than a month, unless there was some perceived benefit. Especially when the Oct 30 date dovetailed perfectly with the 2020 elections. If the date was changed, knowing that cancellation refunds would nullify those sales, it would make even less sense.