Weeks after it was first released, Kanye West's seventh studio album, "The Life of Pablo," finally hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, thanks mostly to streams instead of traditional album purchases or digital downloads, making it the first album to top the charts on the back of a majority of streams.
"The Life of Pablo" received just more than 70 percent of the 94,000 equivalent album units sold to streaming, while only 28,000 were due to pure album sales. It is surprising that the album received this much streaming due to the fact that West once promised all of his Twitter followers that the album would be only available on Tidal when it was first released in February.
Even though West said "The Life of Pablo" would never be available on other platforms, the rapper released two singles in late March, "Famous" and "I Love Kanye," to Spotify and Apple Music before releasing the entire album on the two streaming platforms April 1.
The album was West's seventh straight to hit No. 1, following in the footsteps of "Yeezus" in 2013, "Watch the Throne," a collaborative album with Jay Z in 2011, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" in 2010, 2008's "808s & Heartbreak," "Graduation" in 2007 and "Late Registration" in 2005. The only album of the rapper's to not hit the top spot was his 2004 debut, "The College Dropout."
"Thank you to everybody who made The Life of Pablo the number 1 album in the world," West tweeted to his millions of Twitter followers.
"I also wanted to point out that it's the first album to go number 1 off of streaming," he added.
The rapper even promised he would be touring to support the album by tweeting: "I'm so happy that you guys like the music... I'm working on the tour designs now."
"The Life of Pablo" beat out the previous owner of the most streaming percentage of album sales, which was held by Rihanna's most recent album, "ANTI." The album hit No. 1 with 31.3 percent of its total units sold being streams and had 17,000 in traditional albums sold.
"The Life of Pablo" is not available on traditional platforms where music can be bought (like iTunes) and is still not available as a physical CD or record.
