UPDATE: The final numbers have arrived. As expected, Drake debuts at #1 comfortably. More Life comes in at 504,609 sales including streams with 226,000 of those being pure sales. You can expect these numbers to be pretty consistent for a few weeks because physical copies will be available next week. It also becomes Drake’s seventh consecutive album to debut at #1 on Billboard 200.
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Well, Drake’s run seems to have no end at this point. More Life has already broken Spotify’s one day record with 61.3 million streams, surpassing Ed Sheeran’s Divide by a considerable margin. Now, the sales projections for the album for the first week are in and of course, they are massive.
Both HDD and Billboard report that according to industry insiders, the album will debut at number 1 on the albums chart with 500,000 to 550,000 equivalent album units in the first week. This will be the biggest debut since his own album VIEWS came in last May with 1.04 million units. Pure album sales for More Life, which is now available on all services and retailers, are projected to be in the range of 200,000 to 250,000. The album was debuted on OVO Sound Radio on Apple Music on Saturday so it did not even have a full seven day tracking.
The Billboard 200 chart tracks traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). Each streaming unit is equal to 1,500 streams of songs on an album. Physical copies of Drake’s latest effort are expected to be out in the coming weeks.