Drake's long-awaited new album, Scorpion, has only been in the public's hands for a few days, but the amount of traction its gotten has surpassed everyone's imagination. Drake is so popular that Spotify made it a point to let the world know that Scorpion was attracted over 10 million streams per hour. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in Drake once again shattering all kinds of first-day streaming records on both Spotify and Apple Music.
Considering all that initial success, it wouldn't be surprising for Drake to make his debut at the top of the Billboard charts this week, but the most recent projections for his first week of album sales are putting him far, far ahead of the competition. According to Hip-Hop N More, Drake is on pace to sell between 870k-920k copies its first week, with 275k-300k being pure album sales.
For Drake to almost go platinum in a week is absolutely bonkers, but considering the changes how streaming affects sales, its even more impressive. Recently, the rules were changed so that paid subscriber listens were worth more than free users, in an attempt to curb inflated album sales numbers. The last big album to benefit from these rules was Post Malone's Beerbongs & Bentleys, which still only ended up moving 461k units in its first week. While that's an impressive number for sure, Drake easily almost doubled it without the help of the old streaming rules.
We'll have to wait until Scorpion makes its official chart debut this week to get the official numbers, but it's safe to say that Drake is going to be the king of 2018.