Drake’s Scorpion easily tops the charts

Drake rules the Billboard album chart for a fifth week in a row, but next week may belong to Travis Scott.

Drake’s Scorpion holds at No.1 this week with the equivalent of 145,000 sales in the United States, including nearly 170 million streams and 12,000 copies sold as a full album, according to Nielsen. It is the first album to have five consecutive weeks at No.1 since, well, the last Drake album: Views, released two years ago, held the top spot for its first nine weeks. ( More Life, Drake’s last collection of songs — which he called a “playlist”, not an album — scored three straight weeks at No.1 in 2017.)

Scorpion broke streaming records when it came out. But it has also symbolised just how thoroughly — and how quickly — the music industry has shifted to streaming as its dominant model, with downloads and CD sales practically an afterthought.

Over five weeks on sale, Scorpion has racked up 1.8 billion streams in the United States but sold only 245,000 copies as a full album, according to Nielsen data. Two years ago, Views had more than 850,000 album sales in its first week alone. On next week’s chart, Scorpion may finally be dethroned by Scott’s Astroworld, which, when it came out on Friday, immediately took over the top spots on the internal charts of Spotify, Apple Music and Apple’s iTunes Store.

Also this week, the country star Kenny Chesney opened at No.2 with his new album, Songs For The Saints, which had a much different sales pattern. It sold 67,000 copies as a full album, more than any other title last week, but had just 11.6 million streams — barely more than Scott’s previous album, Birds In The Trap Sing McKnight, had last week.

Post Malone’s Beerbongs & Bentleys is No.3, Juice WRLD’s Goodbye & Good Riddance is No.4 and Cardi B’s Invasion Of Privacy holds at fifth place.