The historic reign of VIEWS has come to an end. After nine consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, Drake's latest album has finally relinquished the top spot. And it was dethroned by an unlikely suspect: the middle-aged alt-rock band Blink-182, whose new album, California, has become the group's second No. 1, the last one being 2001's Take Off Your Pants and Jacket.
California, Blink-182's first album in almost five years, beat out all other releases with a reported 186,000 equivalent album units sold in the week ending July 7. Though it finished in a distant second, VIEWS still boasted an impressive performance by selling an equivalent of 117,000 units in its 10th week of release. In fact, the album's sales are up about 7,000 units (or six percent) from last week. Blink-182 and Drake are the only acts to achieve six-figure sales on this week's chart. The No. 3 spot goes to blackSUMMERS'night, the comeback album from R&B veteran Maxwell, which sold an equivalent of 59,000 units.
The nine weeks that VIEWS spent at the top ranks as the third-most time at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart for all hip-hop albums. The two albums that are ahead of VIEWS were both released in 1990 -- Vanilla Ice's To the Extreme and MC Hammer's Please Hammer Don't Hurt Em, which attained 16 and 21 weeks at No. 1, respectively. With VIEWS, Drake has spent more time at No. 1 than any male artist in over 10 years, when Usher's Confessions was able to top the charts for nine (nonconsecutive) weeks in 2004.
Though Drake's streak of nine in a row has come to an end, that's not to say that VIEWS won't be eligible to reclaim the throne. As its sales have remained relatively steady in the past 10 weeks -- always above 100,000 -- it could easily get back to chasing the streaks of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Next week, assuming that Blink-182's California will experience the dip that's normal for most non-Drake albums, VIEWS' main competition will be ScHoolboy Q's Blank Face LP, which will look to surpass the 139,000 units that its predecessor, 2014's Oxymoron, moved in its first week.
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