On the Charts: Kendrick Lamar Sets 2017’s Best-Selling Week With ‘Damn.’
Kendrick Lamar‘s new LP Damn. set the bar for all 2017 releases as the rapper’s latest LP easily achieved the best-selling week of the year so far.
Damn. sold 603,000 total copies in its first week of availability, nearly 100,000 more than 2017’s previous highest seller, Drake’s More Life. Of Damn!‘s total, 353,000 copies came from traditional album sales, while another 227,000 were generated by streaming equivalent albums, or SEAs, Billboard reports.
Damn! marks Lamar’s third straight Number One album – following 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly and 2016’s Untitled Unmastered – and established a new career high for the rapper sales-wise, as Damn.‘s 603,000 opening week sales far eclipsed To Pimp a Butterfly‘s 324,000 opening week in May 2015.
Hundreds of thousands of copies behind Damn, John Mayer landed at Number Two with The Search for Everything, the second time the singer finished in second place in recent months: The Search for Everything: Wave One debuted at Number Two in February. Mayer’s new LP ended the week with 132,000 total copies.
Besides Damn! and The Search for Everything, only one more new release cracked the Top 10: The soundtrack for the box office record-breaking The Fate of the Furious, which bowed at Number 10 and 37,000 copies.
Drake’s More Life was the highest-ranking returnee at Number Three, with Ed Sheeran’s Divide (Number Four) and the Chainsmokers’ Memories… Do Not Open (Number Five, down from Number One last week) and the Moana soundtrack (Number Six) behind it.
Bruno Mars’ 24K Magic at Number Seven, Future’s Future at Number Eight and the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack at Number Nine closed out the Top 10.
Despite new releases from Incubus and Brad Paisley, Damn. will likely remain atop the Billboard 200 next week.