Sales of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly have mirrored the success of his record breaking Spotify figures, as the Compton rapper’s third album debuts at No 1 in the UK album charts.
Despite being released a week ahead of schedule, the follow-up to Good Kid, MAAD City notched up 9.6m streams on its first full day of release, the most in the streaming service’s seven-year existence and more than the previous record holder, Michael Bublé’s Christmas, which achieved 9.5m streams on Christmas Eve in 2014.
Lamar’s third full-length record narrowly held off competition from chart-botherer Sam Smith, with To Pimp a Butterfly finishing just 572 chart sales ahead of In the Lonely Hour, which slips to second place.
The rest of the top five is largely made up of rock veterans: Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler scores the highest-charting album of his career with Tracker at No 3 and Van Morrison’s Duets: Re-working the Catalogue is in at No 5. Of course, no top 5 would be complete without Ed Sheeran’s X, which sits at 4.
On this week’s Official Singles Chart, Smith and John Legend remain at No 1 with Lay Me Down, the official 2015 Comic Relief single. It had a lead of 9,000 combined chart sales over Years & Years’ King on Sunday 22 March.
Rihanna, Kanye West and Paul McCartney’s FourFiveSeconds climbs two places to No 3, Brit award winner James Bay is at No 4 with Hold Back the River and Ellie Goulding’s Fifty Shades of Grey single Love Me Like You Do is at No 5.
