Billboard predicts that Drake's latest album will sell approximately 800,000 copies its first week. Accounting for streams, VIEWS is expected to shift around 900,000 album equivalent units in total, making it a shoe-in for the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200. Drake's last five projects all debuted at No. 1 as well.
If the predictions are accurate, this will be Drake's best-selling week ever, eclipsing the mark set by Nothing Was The Same, which shifted 658,000 copies its first week. Drake will also snag one of the bigger non-Adele opening weeks in recent years. According to Billboard, the last time a male artist sold more than 800,000 copies in a week was when Justin Timberlake returned to music in 2013 after a lengthy period of silence.
The day after VIEWS debuted on Apple Music, Drake announced that the album had already sold more than 600,000 copies.
Update, 5/4/2016, 9:00 a.m.: VIEWS is now expected to sell nearly one million album equivalent units.
The predictions for VIEWS's first-week album sales have been revised up. Originally the record was expected to shift 800,000 copies and earn another 100,000 units through streaming. But after more than 770,000 copies of VIEWS were scooped up in four days, Billboard reports that industry forecasters are revising their initial estimates. Between physical units and streaming, it's possible that Drake's sales could exceed one million album equivalent units this week.
