Drake Earns 8th No 1 Album On Billboard 200 Chart With 'Scorpion'

New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Drake's 5th solo album 'Scorpion' reached No 1 on their Billboard 200 chart after its first week available after moving 732,000 equivalent album units in the week ending July 5, Billboard reports. Traditional album sales accounted for 160,000 of that final tally.

As reported last week, Scorpion is one of the first albums to be influenced by Billboard's new streaming rules. Under the new rules, paid subscriptions hold a bigger weight compared to free ones. It takes 1,250 streams of an album to equal one sale on paid subscriptions, while 3,750 streams will equal one sale on free streaming options, like Spotify's free tier or YouTube.

The album's first single "God's Plan" has also become the most-streamed song of the year after earning 1.121 billion streams, making it the only song to top a billion streams in 2018. "Nice for What" and "God's Plan" have gone platinum several times over, and though it's not on Scorpion, Lil Baby's "Yes Indeed" featuring Drake also went platinum this past week.

This marks Drizzy's 8th No. 1. That number takes into account the OVO rapper's five solo studio albums, the projects If You're Reading This It's Too Late and What a Time to Be Alive, with Future, and the playlist, More Life. Drizzy moves into a tie with Kanye West and Eminem for the most No. 1 albums among rap acts. They face a steep climb to catch Jay-Z who leads the way for hip-hop with 14. Drizzy also ties West, Shady and The Beatles for most consecutive chart toppers.

The first week for Scorpion was also historic in other ways. The album broke the first-day streaming record over all platforms, after it was streamed 170 million times in 24 hours. It went on to break the one-week streaming record in just three days and eventually became the only album in history to be streamed over 1 billion times in seven days.