After spending weeks streaming exclusively on TIDAL, The Life Of Pablo officially arrived on Spotify and Apple Music last week. According to TIDAL, the album was streamed on its platform more than 250 million times in its first 10 days, suggesting that it would be in high demand on the other two streaming services as well. However, physical copies of the album don't exist, and Kanye has suggested that they never will—at least not in compact disc form: he tweeted, "no more CDs from me."
Since Billboard accounts for streaming data in its album chart, The Life Of Pablo could make history as the first album to grab the top spot on the chart without a physical release. Chart News predicts that TLOP will accumulate 90 million streams, which translates to roughly 60,000 albums on the chart.
Kanye's main competition for No. 1 will reportedly be Chris Stapleton, who got another prime time TV boost at last weekend's ACM Awards, and Lukas Graham, whose debut album includes "7 Years"—currently the No. 2 hit in the country.
Update, 4/8/2016, 3:45 p.m.: According to Hits Daily Double, The Life Of Pablo is the first post-physical No. 1.
Hits Daily Double reports that Kanye West is the first artist in history to hit No. 1 on the Billboard album chart with an album that almost no one bought. According to the report, listeners scooped up the equivalent of 90,000 copies of The Life Of Pablo over the course of the week. Though a few of those sales were from downloads through Kanye's website, most of that 90,000 can be attributed to streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, and elsewhere.
