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Beyoncé‘s latest hit has continued to climb, while J. Cole‘s surprise drop competes for the top spot.
According to Hits Daily Double, Queen Bey’s Cowboy Carter is expected to remain in #1 spot on the Billboard 200 album chart for a second week, with a projected 131K units sold.
Should the superstar stay the course, Cowboy Carter will become her longest running #1 album in over a decade, since the release of her self-titled album (2013).
Cole’s Might Delete Later, the most streamed album of the week, opened strong with on 118k records sold, which was not strong enough to surpass the 32-time Grammy-award-winning artist.
Beyoncé’s Billboard 200 triumph happened right alongside another milestone: topping Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, marking a historic achievement.
With this feat, Bey is now the first Black woman ever to top the latter chart.
According to Billboard, Cowboy Carter debuted atop both charts with 407,000 equivalent album units in its first week. This is now the biggest sales week of 2024, knocking out Future and Metro Boomin, who previously held the title with last month’s We Don’t Trust You.
Twenty three of the album’s 27 songs have also made it to the Billboard Hot 100 chart. This brought her career total Billboard Hot 100 songs to 106. She is now just the 17th artist, and only the third woman, to score over 100 entries since the Hot 100 launched in 1958.
Former chart-topper “Texas Hold ‘Em” led the pack at No. 2, followed by “II Most Wanted” with Miley Cyrus at No. 6 and Bey’s cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” at No. 7.
Meanwhile, J. Cole had a swift change of heart this week, when he pulled the album’s Kendrick Lamar diss, “7 Minute Drill,” from all streaming platforms.
The move comes after Cole publicly apologized to Kendrick for the song while performing at Dreamville Festival over the weekend – where he promised to scrub the song.
“7 Minute Drill,” the closing song on J. Cole’s Might Delete Later, came in response to Kendrick Lamar’s blistering verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That.”
That track, released two weeks earlier on Future and Metro‘s joint album We Don’t Trust You, found K. Dot taking thinly-veiled shots at both Cole and his “First Person Shooter” collaborator Drake.
