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Streaming Helped Him Out A LOT

Times are definitely changing when you can be on top and only sale 823 albums.

According to The New York Times, this is what got A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie to number one on the Billboard 200 chart…

Well that and 83 million streams.

Billboard and Nielsen has Boogie’s sophomore album Hoodie SZN selling the equivalent of 58,000 sales in the U.S. last week. This number incorporates streams, downloads of individual tracks and sales of the full album. A huge majority of Hoodie SZN‘s success comes from the streaming. It clearly wasn’t the 823 albums sold.

The less than a thousand copies that were sold were all from downloads, considering the album hasn’t been released in a physical format yet. The numbers represent an all-time record of the least amount of albums sold in a week for an album that went No. 1.

Hoodie SZN beats a record that was set just the week before when 21 Savage‘s I Am > I Was sold 3,481 copies and had 84 million streams.

These numbers are reflective of an industry that has become so reliant on streaming that actual CD sales are nearly disappearing, except for a handful of stars like Adele and Taylor Swift.

And, of course, if you’re selling your CD with a cute poster or concert tickets (*ahem* Travis Scott and Nicki Minaj), then you’re getting some nice CD sells as well.

According to a Recording Industry Association of America report, in the first half of 2018, streaming represented 75 percent of all retail sales revenue in the U.S. Meanwhile, physical formats were just a meek 10 percent. Before Billboard started incorporating streaming numbers in its album chart in 2014, the lowest sales number for a No. 1 album was 40,478, set by Amos Lee‘s Mission Bell in February 2011.

So yea, streaming is king.

No surprise there.

But shout out to those 823 people who bought Boogie’s whole album!

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