Beyoncé album repeats at No.1 for first time in 11 years

Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter holds at No.1 for a second week on the Billboard album chart, fending off new releases from J. Cole and K-pop group Tomorrow X Together.

Cowboy Carter stays at the top of the Billboard 200 with the equivalent of 125,500 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. That total includes 133 million streams and 20,500 copies sold as a complete package. It is the first time Beyoncé has repeated at No.1 since her self-titled “visual album” in 2013, which notched three consecutive times at the top and was initially available only as a download from iTunes.

As in its opening week, Beyoncé’s total was helped by sales of physical copies of her album on CD and vinyl, which for the album’s first two weeks were available only through her website. Since then, retailers have started stocking Cowboy Carter and — as she did with Renaissance, her last album, in 2022 — Beyoncé herself showed up for an in-store promo in Los Angeles, where fans could buy autographed LPs. They quickly appeared on eBay for US$2,000 (73,000 baht) and up.

Might Delete Later, a surprise release by rapper J. Cole, comes in at second place with the equivalent of 115,000 sales, largely from streaming. The album got some attention for the diss track 7 Minute Drill targeting Kendrick Lamar, which J. Cole promptly apologised for and removed from streaming versions of the album.

Tomorrow X Together, a five-man South Korean group, opens at No.3 with Minisode 3: Tomorrow, a seven-track mini album, which had 107,500 sales and was offered in 17 collectible CD editions. Also this week, Future and Metro Boomin’s joint album We Don’t Trust You, released three weeks ago, falls to No.4 (a sequel, We Still Don’t Trust You, came out on Friday), and Morgan Wallen’s One Thing At A Time is No.5.