Kodak Black Replaces XXXTentacion at No. 1 With ‘Dying to Live’

Kodak Black opened at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart this week with the kind of consumption pattern that became increasingly common in 2018: big streaming numbers, but such a minuscule number of old-fashioned sales that it barely seemed to count.

“Dying to Live” (Atlantic), the South Florida rapper’s latest — and his first album since being released from prison in August — had the equivalent of 89,000 album sales in the United States last week, according to Nielsen. That included 114 million streams of tracks from the record, yet only about 5,000 purchases of the full album — a number that, in those distant, pre-streaming Dark Ages of four or five years ago, might not have been enough to qualify even for the Top 100.

Also this week, Meek Mill’s “Championships” holds at No. 2; Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s soundtrack for “A Star Is Born” is No. 3; Michael Bublé’s perennial hit “Christmas” is No. 4; and the new soundtrack to “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (Republic), featuring Post Malone, Nicki Minaj, Juice WRLD and others, opened at No. 5.

“Springsteen on Broadway” (Columbia), the official album from Bruce Springsteen’s just-ended show, opened at No. 11 with 38,000 sales and 1.8 million streams, and XXXTentacion’s “Skins,” last week’s No. 1, dropped to No. 17.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/arts/music/kodak-black-dying-to-live-billboard-chart.html?partner=rss&emc=rss