Drake Scores First Hot 100 No. 1 + Outselling Beyonce

Drake

Congrats to Drake! The rapper/singer has snagged his first No. 1 as a lead artist on the Billboard Hot 100 (dated May 21), as “One Dance,” featuring WizKid and Kyla, according to Billboard. ‘One Dance’ is featured on his new album, Views, which debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with his best sales week and a record-setting weekly streaming total.

In the week since its release on iTunes and Apple Music, Views has sold just over 1 million equivalent album units, according to Nielsen Music. That total includes pure album sales (852,000 copies), song sales (240,000 downloads) and, most impressively, streams (a record-breaking 245.1 million).

David Bakula, Nielsen Entertainment’s senior vice president of analytics, tells USA Today,

It’s a combination of an artist at the very top of the game and an artist who fits in with the right type of genre for that type of consumer. Obviously, the hip-hop and R&B fan is a very stream-heavy consumer. You get a platform that has as broad a reach as Apple does, and those are the ingredients for something that is record-breaking.

The rapper is doing better in the streaming record set by Beyoncé just a week earlier, when she released Lemonade, that started with 115 million plays on Tidal. Since its debut, Lemonade has sold 974,000 equivalent album units through retailers such as iTunes, Amazon and Tidal (681,000 of which were pure album sales). Drake has already managed to sell in one week what Beyoncé has in two. Anywho, congrats to them both! [USA Today, Billboard]

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