Kanye West's ‘Pablo’ is Billboard’s first mostly-streaming number one

Kanye West is making history with his newest album, The Life of Pablo, which is now the first album to hit Number 1 on Billboard's Top 200 chart with a majority of "units" moved coming from streaming. 

According to Billboard, of the 94,000 TLOP units moved in the week ending April 7, 28,000 units were from "traditional album sales" including sales on the Tidal website as well as West's website. The other 66,000 units, called "streaming equivalent album" (SEA) units, were from online streaming which, by Billboard's math, is equal to 99 million track streams (1,500 streams per SEA "unit").

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In December 2014, the music sales-tracking publication incorporated single track sales and album streams from services like Tidal and Spotify into its metrics. Because of Kanye's non-traditional approach to TLOP's release, no individual tracks were available for purchase, meaning streams and whole album sales were the only metrics measured by Billboard.

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Billboard reports that TLOP's one-week stream totals are second only to that of Purpose, the most recent album from Justin Bieber, which netted 67,000 SEA units in its first week of release in November 2015.

TLOP is Kanye's seventh album to hit number one on Billboard. It initially debuted on Tidal, Jay-Z's streaming service, in February before hitting other services at the end of March.

And, of course, Kanye tweeted about it. 

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