UPDATED Aug. 31, 2:36 p.m. ET: According to HITS Daily Double, Kanye West’s Donda has a new projected number just after two days of streaming. The website reports Donda will do 350K, with 50K of that in digital album sales.
See original story from 8/30/21 below.
It isn’t Yeezy season without some impressive numbers, and it seems Kanye West’s latest album Donda has a similar destiny.
The project, which was released on Sunday following ‘Ye’s Thursday night listening event in Chicago, finally arrived in a 27-track package around 8 a.m. after three listening events, a public feud with Drake, and confusion over if the album was supposed to drop in the first place. Either way, all of the conversation around Donda has given Yeezy a pretty remarkable edge over Halsey’s latest release If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, with Donda projected to gross at or above 300K in its first week, according to HITS Daily Double.
These figures would put Donda on track to become the best-performing Kanye album in a first week since 2013’s Yeezus, which sold 327,000 during a time when CDs were more widely available in stores and the world was transitioning to streaming. Since then, 2016’s The Life of Pablo came in at 94,000 units due to its initial TIDAL exclusivity, Ye saw 208,000 in its first week in 2018, and Jesus is King had first-week numbers of 264,000.
Of course, the album arrived on a Sunday, which HITS calls “typically the lowest streaming day of the week” with few models to look at, so the outlet is calling the numbers their “best guess.”
Donda currently has a hold on the entire top 10 on Spotify and top 20 on Apple Music as of Monday morning and has also landed at No. 1 in 130 countries on Apple Music, which TMZ reports is the most No. 1 entries in history.
The numbers for ‘Ye’s 10th solo album—his first since the gospel-laced Jesus is King in 2019—come after just a day on streaming services. As HITS expects, Donda will debut at No. 1 with very little competition despite Halsey’s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross-backed effort expected to earn between 95,000 and 115,000 in total activity, while Lil Tecca’s We Love You Tecca 2 is looking at somewhere between 30,000 and 35,000.
Billboard also shared Monday that Yeezy’s third Donda event in Chicago broke Apple Music’s livestream record yet again. Roughly 5.9 million viewers tuned in to watch ‘Ye set himself on fire during the album’s play-though, as the most viewers in a single stream’s history, which beat his previous record from his second listening event, 5.4 million viewers.
Previously, Taylor Swift’s Fearless (Taylor’s Version) had seen the biggest first-week numbers of 2021 so far, with 291,000 grossed in its first week on streaming back in April, until Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album Sour took that throne with 295,000. It’s unclear where Drake will stand in those numbers after announcing Certified Lover Boy’s Sept. 3 release date, but fans should get an idea early next week.
