Drake Sets 2018 First-Week Sales Record With ‘Scorpion’

Drake has been at the forefront the pop culture conversation in the past few months, and the first week sales of Scorpion back up his status as one of the biggest names in music. According to Billboard, Scorpion moved 732,000 album-equivalent units, setting the high-water mark for 2018 in the process.

The sales success of Scorpion comes at a particularly fascinating time, as it was one of the first albums impacted by a change in Billboard’s sales weighting system which put more of an emphasis on streams from paid services like Apple Music, Tidal, and Spotify Premium as opposed to free ones.

Streaming was a major driving force for the success of Scorpion, and it showed in the numbers. Per Billboard, it was the first album to have its tracks reach 1 billion global streams in a week, and it handily beat beerbongs & bentleys by Post Malone for the largest streaming week ever (Post had 431.3 million, Drizzy notched 745.9 million).

Scorpion is Drake’s eighth No. 1 album, beginning with 2010’s Thank Me Later . On “Sandra’s Rose” he compared his sales success to that of Adele:

I wasn’t made for no casket or no prison cell
Every title doin' numbers like I’m Miss Adele

That’s a bit of hyperbole, as Adele’s album 25 moved nearly 3.4 million first-week unites in the U.S. alone, but the returns for Scorpion are the highest since Taylor Swift moved 1.2 million units of Reputation late last year, so he’s firmly in the pop star tier.

Chart success is nothing new for Drake, as Genius broke down in a video about his eight-year streak having a single on the Hot 100.

Read all the lyrics to Scorpion and the rest of Drake’s discography on Genius now.