Late last month, the 26-year-old Chicago rapper King Von released his debut studio album, “Welcome to O’Block,” and it landed at No. 13 on the Billboard 200 chart — a modest but impressive showing for a young performer still making his way up.
But just a week after his album came out, King Von, whose real name is Dayvon Bennett, was shot and killed in a brawl outside an Atlanta nightclub. As tributes poured in on social media, streams for “Welcome to O’Block” grew, and in its second week out the album has climbed to No. 5 with the equivalent of 44,000 sales in the United States, including nearly 64 million streams, according to Nielsen Music. Its total sales number is up 69 percent from the album’s first week.
Ariana Grande’s latest release, “Positions,” holds at No. 1 for a second week, with the equivalent of 82,000 sales, down 53 percent. Pop Smoke’s posthumous “Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon” — a steady hit since July — rose one spot to No. 2 in its 19th week out.
The Kid Laroi, an Australian rapper, landed at No. 3 with an expanded reissue of his mixtape “____ Love,” which first came out in July. The country star Luke Combs’s “What You See Ain’t Always What You Get” (a deluxe version of his year-old album “What You See Is What You Get”) is No. 4.
Nav, a Canadian rapper who over the last year and a half has landed two No. 1 albums thanks in part to zealous marketing through merchandise bundles, opened at No. 6 with a new mixtape, “Emergency Tsunami”; Billboard stopped counting albums sold with merchandise bundles last month.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
