Rapper Sells 823 Albums, Tops Billboard Chart

Scoring the Billboard No. 1 spot with album Hoodie SZN was a big moment for New York rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie—and a new low for traditional album sales. The rapper made the top spot on the Billboard 200 by selling just 823 albums, all of them downloads, since the album was not released in any physical formats, the New York Times reports. But the 23-year-old also had around 83 million on-demand streams, which, along with downloads of individual tracks, led to him being credited with the equivalent of 58,000 album sales under Billboard and Nielsen's "streaming equivalent albums" system.

The previous record for No. 1 with the fewest sales was set just a week earlier by Robbie Savage's "I Am > I Was," with 3,481 album sales and 84 million streams, AFP reports. Before Billboard started including streaming figures in late 2014, the record for No. 1 with the lowest sales was Amos Lee's "Mission Bell" in 2011, with 40,478 sales. The Times notes that according to the most recent Recording Industry Association of America figures, physical album sales have fallen off a cliff: They made up just 10% of US album sales in the first half of 2018, with 18.6 million CDs sold, down 47% from a year earlier. (Best Buy stopped selling CDs last year.)