![]() 1 albums continues a slide that’s been in place for more than five years.Īs mentioned earlier, 18 different albums by hip-hop artists ascended to No. It would be easy to write off this latest blip as a statistical anomaly, especially given rap’s trademark resiliency and its status in 2022 as the number-one consumed genre for the sixth year running.īut hip-hop’s diminishing unit share of No. So what gives for this once unstoppable genre, and should the industry be concerned? And those 18 albums made up nearly 44 percent of the total number of No. 1 chart-toppers in 2018 was 279,000 album equivalent units sold. The average first-week numbers for those 18 No. By comparison, country singer Morgan Wallen’s One Thing At A Time album debuted in March with more than 500,000 equivalent album units moved during its first week…a more than 9-to-1 ratio. That would be Trippie Redd’s 56,000 units for Mansion Musik. Otherwise, hip-hop has been represented in the top ten by a few holdovers from 2022 like Drake & 21 Savage’s Her Loss, Lil Baby’s It’s Only Me, and Metro Boomin’s album, which happens to be the only rap set in the current week’s top ten.Īnd the highest weekly sales/consumption number for a hip-hop album so far in 2023? 9) in February with his latest release, Let’s Start Here, but that album was a complete departure from hip-hop as the versatile Atlanta artist experimented with the psychedelic rock/soul genre-think early Funkadelic meets Pink Floyd-and denounced his previous mumble-rap persona in the process (a good decision for him, btw!). Lil Yachty performs a track from his rock album on SNL (Saturday, April 1, 2023)Ī fifth rapper, Lil Yachty, entered the top ten (No. ![]() 8 also March 11) and Youngboy Never Broke Again’s I Rest My Case (No. What’s more, only three other rap albums released in 2023 have even reached the top ten: Yeat’s AfterLyfe (No. 3 on the weekly rankings (Trippie Redd’s Mansion Musk reached that position on the Billboard ranking dated Feb. Since then, no rap album has ranked higher than No. The current drought dates back to December 17, 2022, when Metro Boomin’s HEROES & VILLIANS reached No. Only 12 albums by rappers-with only ten of those truly qualifying as rap-have topped the Billboard 200 chart in the past 16 months (all occurring last year). 2021, or an average of nearly 16 per year.īut things have clearly cooled since the beginning of 2022. 1 in 2018 alone-a single-year record-with a total of 78 such albums topping the chart from Jan. This correlated with the Billboard charts where as many as 18 albums by rappers reached No. Rap music saw significant growth during the 2010s thanks mainly to streaming’s popularity, plus the emergence of southern hip-hop’s music capital in Atlanta and different ways of breaking new artists through social media platforms like SoundCloud and TikTok.įor the past six years hip-hop has been the dominant form of music, beating all other genres in terms of annual consumption numbers and percentage market share (based on revenue). Afterwards, the next two years-1988 and ‘89–also experienced this first-quarter hip-hop void.īut times are far different from what they were during hip-hop’s developmental years. ![]() 1 album by a rap act was in March 1987 (Beastie Boys’ License To Ill). 3, 2011).īefore then, only three other first-quarter shutouts happened this century: in ‘01, ‘02 and ‘09.Īs hip-hop was still expanding in the ‘90s, this first-quarter absence occurred with more regularity-happening each year from 1990-95, plus 1998–with rap not yet having established its current foothold on music’s mainstream. 1 album by a rapper prior to Nicki’s reign had been Drake’s Take Care (Dec. That was when Nicki Minaj ended a four-month-and-two-week drought with Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded (on the chart dated April 21, 2012). 1 album from a hip-hop artist was back in 2012(!). Now, it’s only April and the year is still young, but the last time the first quarter of any year went by without a No. So far this year, through the latest chart dated April 8, zero albums by rappers have topped the Billboard 200–the ranking that tracks sales, streaming and digital consumption of all commercial EP, LP and mixtape releases here in the U.S. While the first quarter of any year is usually pretty tepid in terms of new album releases or meaningful sales numbers from major artists (unless your name happens to be country music’s Morgan Wallen), the data from the first three months of 2023 is particularly unsettling for hip-hop. This may be hip-hop’s 50th anniversary year, but there’s very little to celebrate so far in 2023 about album consumption and Billboard chart numbers when it comes to rappers. Billboard charts, Hip hop news, Music blog, music news
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