Kanye West makes history with The Life Of Pablo, just as he predicted

It looks like Kanye West wasn’t just being optimistic when he recently announced his plans to crank out three albums over the next year, while also eschewing future CD releases. His latest album, The Life Of Pablo, has fared exceptionally well in the music-streaming world, garnering 250 million streams in its first 10 days on Tidal. Now The Life Of Pablo has ridden that Tidal wave to land the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Top 200 chart, making history as the first album to do so primarily off the sale of online “units,” i.e., streams.

According to Billboard and Nielsen Music, The Life Of Pablo reached the equivalent of 94,000 album units, with less than a third of them coming from traditional album sales. The majority of the album’s sales were “streaming equivalent album” (or SEA) units, which Billboard said accounts for 99 million track streams. This marks West’s seventh consecutive No. 1 album, a fact which he left out of a tweet noting this momentous occasion.