Frank Ocean’s long-awaited album ‘Blonde’ has officially debut at the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200.
This makes Frank’s first No. 1 album with 276,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending Aug. 25, according to Nielsen Music. ‘Blonde’ also has the third-largest first week behind Drake’s ‘Views’ and Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade.’
via Billboard:
The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption, which includes traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). The new Sept. 10-dated chart (where Blonde bows at No. 1) will be posted in full to Billboard’s websites on Tuesday, Aug. 30.
Of Blonde’s start of 276,000 units, 232,000 were in traditional album sales, while the rest were SEA (44,000 units).
Only two albums started bigger than Blonde in 2016: Drake’s Views (1.04 million units earned in its debut frame) and Beyonce’s Lemonade (653,000). Blonde also logs the third-biggest sales start — behind, again, just Views (852,000 copies sold in its first week) and Lemonade (485,000).
Blonde was available exclusively to stream via the Apple Music service and for sale through the iTunes Store (but only as a full album — none of its tracks were sold a la carte). The songs on the Blonde album generated 65.4 million streams during the week. It was the second-most streamed album on the chart, behind only Drake’sViews, with 67.5 million streams.
Congrats to Frank!
