Kendrick Lamar Blasts to No. 1 on Billboard Artist 100
The rapper rules the Artist 100, Billboard 200 & Hot 100, up 774 percent in overall activity.
Kendrick Lamar is the top musical act in the U.S., leaping from No. 6 to No. 1 on the Billboard Artist 100 chart (dated May 6).
The Artist 100 (which launched in July 2014) measures artist activity across key metrics of music consumption, blending album and track sales, radio airplay, streaming and social media fan interaction to provide a weekly multi-dimensional ranking of artist popularity.
Lamar logs his third total week atop the Artist 100. He first hit No. 1 on April 4, 2015, when his album To Pimp a Butterfly arrived as his first leader on the Billboard 200. He returned to the top of the Artist 100 on March 26, 2016, when Untitled Unmastered. opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
Lamar rockets back to the Artist 100’s summit with a 774 percent gain in overall activity. As previously reported, his new LP DAMN. starts atop the Billboard 200 with 603,000 equivalent album units, including 353,000 in traditional album sales, according to Nielsen Music, with the latter sum accounting for 63 percent of Lamar’s total Artist 100 chart points. Meanwhile, the set’s lead single, “Humble.,” lifts 2-1 to become his first No. 1 as a lead artist on the Billboard Hot 100.
Lamar becomes the sixth artist to dominate the Artist 100, Billboard 200 and Hot 100 simultaneously. Previously, Taylor Swift ran up seven such triple-threat weeks in 2014-15, followed by The Weeknd (two, 2015), Adele (six, 2015-16), Drake (a record nine, 2016) and Ed Sheeran (two, 2017).
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Rounding out the Artist 100’s top five, Sheeran holds at No. 2; John Mayer hits a new No. 3 high, re-entering as his new album, The Search for Everything, debuts at No. 3 on the Billboard 200; Bruno Mars keeps at No. 4; and Drake drops 3-5.
Check out this week’s entire Artist 100 here.