Remember when Kanye West revealed on Twitter that his latest album would only ever be available on Tidal? Well, he's probably very happy he had a change of heart and released The Life of Pablo on the other services.
The Life of Pablo just became the rapper's seventh album to hit number one on the Billboard 200 chart, and the first to album to reach number one with the majority of its sales coming from streaming services.
According to Billboard, Kanye sold the equivalent of 94,000 album units of The Life of Pablo last week, with only 28,000 coming from pure album sales.
The rest, an impressive 70 percent, of the album sales came from streaming.
This means Kanye made music history by releasing an album that hit number one mostly due to streaming. He blew Rihanna's record out the park, as the star, earlier this month, saw her new album Anti jump back to the number one spot, with 31.1 percent of its total units coming from streams.
Thank you to everybody who made The Life of Pablo the number 1 album in the world!!!
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 9, 2016
I also wanted to point out that it's the first album to go number 1 off of streaming!!!
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 9, 2016
While Kanye is celebrating by letting the world know of his accomplishment, the rapper's music milestone did not beat another streaming record: the most overall streaming units. While The Life of Pablo is the first to get to number one where most units were streams, Justin Bieber actually holds the overall streaming units record with his recent album Purpose.
Kanye dropped The Life of Pablo exclusively on Tidal on Feb. 13. The rapper then released the single "Famous," featuring Rihanna, on Apple Music, Google Play Music and Spotify before releasing the album in its entirety on those streaming platforms on April 1.
This goes to show just how much exclusives on streaming services can impact overall album "sales" in order to have that artist reach the top of the charts. In this case, it seems like Kanye teasing listeners by releasing his music on just one platform before a wider release worked.
The self-proclaimed "greatest rapper of all time" was recently added to TIME's second annual 30 Most Influential People on the Internet list, so it looks like all those Twitter rants have paid off, too.
Source: Billboard
Photo: Diego Quintana | Flickr
