Kanye West’s ‘The Life Of Pablo’ Tops Album Chart With Low Sales, Decent Streams

Robbie Daw | April 11, 2016 11:24 am

After finally arriving on iTunes and streaming services like Spotify on April 1, Kanye West‘s The Life Of Pablo becomes the rapper’s seventh album in a row to top the Billboard 200. Only making the album available initially on TIDAL for the first six weeks had an expected negative impact on TLOP‘s opening numbers in its first-week chart showing, of course — while it racked up 94,000 equivalent album units, only 28,000 of those were actual sales. Billboard points out that 70% of Pablo‘s first-week numbers on the main album chart were made up by streams.

By comparison, Chris Stapleton performed at the Academy Of Country Music Awards on April 3, and sees his debut LP Traveller jump up to #2 on the strength of 59,000 copies sold. (The album’s overall units moved were 73,000.) That leaves new releases from Lukas Graham, Weezer and Big Sean and Jhene Aiko‘s Twenty88 side project to debut at #3, #4 and #5, respectively.

A pretty ho-hum week all around, we’d say.

The Top 10 of the Billboard 200:

1. Kanye West, The Life Of Pablo *new* *1 week*
2. Chris Stapleton, Traveller
3. Lukas Graham, Lukas Graham *new*
4. Weezer, Weezer (The White Album) *new*
5. Twenty88, Twenty88 *new*
6. Rihanna, Anti
7. Zayn, Mind Of Mine
8. Justin Bieber, Purpose
9. Adele, 25
10. Twenty One Pilots, Blurryface

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