Drake’s ‘Certified Lover Boy’ Opens With the Year’s Biggest Week

Drake also dominates Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, which incorporates streams, radio play and song downloads. Nine of the chart’s Top 10 songs are by Drake, with “Way 2 Sexy,” featuring Future and Young Thug, at No. 1. (The only non-Drake song is “Stay,” by the Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber, which fell four spots to No. 6.)

But “Certified Lover Boy” did not quite match the streaming performance of Drake’s last proper studio album, “Scorpion,” in 2018. In its first week out, “Scorpion” had 746 million clicks. The minutiae of chart composition shows that “Certified Lover Boy” is not as close to that record as it might seem. When “Scorpion” came out, Billboard counted only audio streams; in 2020, it began incorporating both audio and video clicks. According to Billboard, the 744 million total streams for “Certified Lover Boy” include nearly 29 million for videos.

West’s “Donda,” last week’s chart-topper, fell to second place with the equivalent of 141,000 sales, a drop of 54 percent.

Also this week, the veteran British heavy metal band Iron Maiden scored its highest chart position ever with “Senjutsu,” which opens at No. 3 — with just 3.6 million streams, but 61,000 copies sold as a full package. The band’s last two studio albums, “The Book of Souls” (2015) and “The Final Frontier” (2010), each went to No. 4. (And 1980s classics like “Powerslave” and “Somewhere in Time”? They never cracked the Top 10.)

Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 4 and Doja Cat’s “Planet Her” is No. 5.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/arts/music/drake-certified-lover-boy-billboard.html