Kendrick Lamar was certainly king of the Billboard 200 this week, as To Pimp A Butterfly sold three times as many copies as any other record on the market during the last week. Part of the hip-hop game, more so than any other genre, is arguing about who's no. 1. Generally that means a ranking of who can drop the best bars, but money—regardless of what Jay Z and Jermaine Dupri tell you—is most certainly a thang. So how does the most hyped performer in recent years stack up against industry giants in terms of sales? Billboard lets us know.
The answer is..."pretty well." Some names were obviously going to be out of reach for Lamar, based on establishment alone. Eminem and Jay Z, for example, sole several hundred thousand more copies of their most recent albums than To Pimp A Butterfly. Drake was this year's biggest debut, the only album ahead of Lamar at this point, with If You're Reading This Its Too Late. More interesting perhaps was the success of J. Cole's 2014 Forest Hills Drive, which beat Butterfly by 30,000 copies despite the relative lack of press for that emcee. Along the same lines, Kanye West only beat Lamar by 3,000 first week copies of Yeezus, despite his never-ending media circus.
That said, Lamar still a couple of the most talked-about members of the hip-hop community beat. Nicki Minaj, T.I. and Rick Ross couldn't hold a candle to Butterfly's sales numbers with their most recent releases. In fact, only two albums from those performers have ever outsold Butterfly in one week (Minaj's Pink Friday and T.I.'s Paper Trail).
Here are the full numbers found by Billboard. Interestingly, Lil Wayne isn't included despite releasing an album during 2013 (it sold 217,000 first week copies).
Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013) 792,000
Jay Z, Magna Carta... Holy Grail (2013) 527,000
Drake, If You're Reading This It's Too Late (2015) 495,000
J. Cole, 2014 Forest Hills Drive (2014) 354,000
Kanye West, Yeezus (2013) 327,000
Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp A Butterfly (2015) 324,000
Nicki Minaj, The Pinkprint (2014) 244,000
Wale, The Gifted (2013) 158,000
ScHoolboy Q, Oxymoron (2014) 139,000
A$AP Rocky, Long.Live.A$AP (2013) 139,000
Big Sean, Dark Sky Paradise (2015) 139,000
Jeezy, Seen It All: The Autobiography (2014) 121,000
Wiz Khalifa, Blacc Hollywood (2014) 90,000
Lecrae, Anomaly (2014) 88,000
T.I., Paperwork (2014) 80,000
Rick Ross, Hood Billionaire (2014) 74,000
Future, Honest (2014) 53,000
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