Drake's surprise mixtape, If You're Reading This It's Too Late, may have surpassed even his own expectations, as the first week (actually, three days) of sales have been announced. According to Billboard, the project easily secured the No. 1 spot on the charts, while selling a massive total of 535,000 units since its release last week. That number is included with streams of the project, with 495,000 units coming from pure album sales, which were entirely from digital sales.
Along with Drake's impressive three-day sales number, he also put in work on Spotify, and broke multiple records on the streaming service, including the most streams in the debut week of an album with 17.3 million. This is Drake's third-biggest first week sales of an album, only falling behind Take Care and Nothing Was The Same, which were rolled out with traditional marketing strategies. This is the highest selling first week for a rap project since Eminem's MMLP2 album, which sold 792,000 units in 2013.
UPDATE 2/19/15: Drake's wins keep coming, as Billboard announced that he has become the first rapper to top their "Artist 100" chart. This is an interactive chart that tracks every influential chart on Billboard and blends them together for one cohesive chart. For comparison, the next rapper on the list after Drake is Nicki Minaj at No. 9, so it seems pretty significant that he was able to do this.
