Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo was released in February, but it was only available via TIDAL. Initially, its sales and streams through the service were not reported to Nielsen Music, and it was thus unable to chart on Billboard. On April 1, the album became available to other streaming services, and went on sale via his website and TIDAL. The streams and sales were finally reported to Nielsen, enabling its arrival on the charts – two months after its initial release.
Selling 94k units this week, TLOP tops the charts of the Billboard 200, becoming the first album ever to top the chart with the majority of its units being generated by streaming equivalent albums. (Only 28k of that number were through traditional sales.) Looks like there really was a method to his madness, huh? Congrats, Ye!
Congrats are also in order for Ye’s G.O.O.D. Music artist Big Sean, who arrives at number 5 on the Billboard 200 this week alongside Jhene Aiko with TWENTY88. The surprise joint album sold an impressive 49k units in its first week.
Check out the full top 10 below!
Marisa Mendez: Twitter || Instagram
- Kanye West – The Life of Pablo 94k
- Chris Stapleton – Traveller 73k
- Lukas Graham – Lukas Graham 59k
- Weezer – White Album 49k
- Big Sean & Jhene Aiko – TWENTY88 49k
- Rihanna – ANTI 48k
- Zayn – Mind of Mine 44k
- Justin Bieber – Purpose 41k
- Adele – 25 36k
- Twenty One Pilots – Blurryface 30k
Thank you to everybody who made The Life of Pablo the number 1 album in the world!!!
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 9, 2016
I also wanted to point out that it’s the first album to go number 1 off of streaming!!!
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 9, 2016
Source: Billboard
