The numbers are in and according to Billboard's tabulations, Drake sold 851,000 equivalent album units of his latest release, VIEWS. It's a monster figure, the biggest sales week by far of any record released in 2016. Drake beat out releases from Beyoncé, Kanye West, Rihanna, and Kendrick Lamar to name but a select few.
That gigantic number also represents the best sales week of Drake's entire career, as well as the biggest mark notched by any single male artist from the past three years. The last album to inhabit the same fiscal atmosphere as VIEWS was Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience, which sold 968,000 copies in the week ending March 24, 2013. The only albums since to sell at least 850,000 copies in a single week are Taylor Swift's 1989, which moved 1.29 million copies in 2014, and Adele's 25, which sold a record breaking 3.38 million copies in its first week.
With this latest tally on the books, it's all but a guarantee that Drake will unseat Beyoncé to claim the No. 1 spot on Billboard's album charts when the results of all other sales become official sometime during the afternoon of May 8. VIEWS is set to become Drake's sixth consecutive No. 1 album.
