Kodak Black Earns First No. 1 With ‘Dying to Live’
Written by SOURCE on December 23, 2018
Kodak Black has his first-ever No. 1 album, thanks to his fans’ stream-heavy appetite for his latest release.
Billboard notes that Dying to Live netted 89,000 album equivalent units in the week ending on December 20. 5,000 of those were traditional album sales, while the other 84,000 albums came from streaming and track numbers on hits like “Zeze.”
The magazine reports that Kodak landed atop the Billboard 200 on the strength of 82,000 streaming equivalent album units. Using their conversion rate that translates streams into an equivalent album sales, that comes out to 114.2 million streams this week. That also made Dying to Live the most-streamed album of the week.
Beyond the insane catchiness of “Zeze” and the impressive oddness of his music videos, Black’s music has received boosts from some of the biggest names in music. Drake reached out to the rapper recently to gush about how much he loved this latest slab of music.
“Your purpose is so pure,” Drake wrote to the rapper, in a series of texts shared by Kodak on Instagram. “What got you there? Like you are almost talking from this god level birds eye view (sic) of your own life. I wanna know how you broke that wall.”
Black’s new album is the highest-profile new release of the week, with the rest of the Top 4 coming from albums that have already topped the charts. Meek Mill’s Champions, the soundtrack to A Star Is Born, and Michael Buble’s latest Christmas album fall in line behind Black.
The next-highest new album this week is the soundtrack to Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse, which lands at No. 5.
