Beyonce held the title of most albums sold in a week in 2016 for a period of seven days before Drake overtook the Queen’s spot with the debut of VIEWS. The project tops Billboard’s Top 200 albums with more than one million units sold. Prince’s albums continue to sell in the wake of the singer’s death and the cast of Empire releases another soundtrack.
Drake’s “VIEWS” From The Top Of The Charts
Drake did it. He sold one million albums in a week. The official sales numbers say he sold 1,039,058 units of his fourth studio album, VIEWS, as it lands at the #1 spot. This surpasses Beyonce, who sold 652,665 units of LEMONADE to rake in the highest debut week of 2016. VIEWS was streamed 245,087,706 times as it was released as an Apple Music exclusive. In comparison, TIDAL reports that Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo was streamed 250 million times in its first 10 days. Drake’s other projects also saw leaps in sales. His collaborative project with Future, What a Time to Be Alive, saw a 33 percent jump and lands at #20. Take Care sits at #47 with a 34% increase.
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Beyonce’s “LEMONADE” Keeps Fans Coming Back
Beyonce’s LEMONADE lands at #2 this week, but still pushed six figures, selling 321,312 units. This makes the total sales for the album 973,977 units. LEMONADE is still a TIDAL exclusive for streaming, where it was listened to or watched nearly 1 million times its second week from release. It is only available for purchase at iTunes so far, where fans gobbled it up 196,252 times.
Cast Of “Empire” Continues Reign
The cast of Empire released the Season 2 Volume 2 soundtrack last week. The project charts at #26 with 17,865 album equivalent units. It was streamed nearly 2 million times in one week. The Season 2 Volume 1 debuted at #16 last year with about 30,000 units of sales.
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Top 10 Billboard Top 200 Rap & R&B Albums For The Week Ending 05/05/2016
Note: The first number below is this week’s “total album equivalent units” count, an intersection of album sales, single sales, and streams implemented by Billboard’s new rating system. A pure album sales figure is available in bold in parenthesis and information about each album’s streaming count is available in brackets.
#1 Drake – VIEWS– 1,039,058 (851,675) [245,087,706]
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#2 Beyonce- LEMONADE – 321,312 (196,252) [97,454,388]
#3 Prince – Purple Rain – 75,443 (60,332) [846,149]
#4 Prince – Very Best of Prince – 69,886 (55,441) [1,039,386]
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#5 Rihanna – ANTI – 50,688 (15,093) [36,665,774]
#11 Kanye West – The Life of Pablo – 26,896 (187) [40,063,626]
#14 Prince – 1999 – 24,923 (23,680) [85,838]
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#15 Kevin Gates – ISLAH – 23,135 (7,559) [16,537,701]
#16 Bryson Tiller – Trapsoul – 22,286 (5,758) [21,241,872]
#20 Drake and Future – What a Time To Be Alive – 20,850 (4,836) [17,808,737]
