After 2024 proved to be a pivotal year for hip-hop in many ways, an uptrend in sales numbers for the rap game is carrying over into 2025, with some of the genre’s top acts at the helm.
Lil Baby kicked off the year in January fresh out the gate with WHAM, his first album in nearly three years. Moving 140,000 equivalent album units in its first week, the 15-track LP marked the Atlanta rapper’s fourth consecutive project to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. WHAM also notably found Young Thug laying down his first publicly released verse since being freed from jail on the track “Dum, Dumb and Dumber” featuring Future.
As Drake and Kendrick Lamar took the most monumental rap beef of all time from diss tracks to the courtroom and onto stages like the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show, both MCs remain at the top of the sphere in 2025, and have the album sales to prove it. When Drizzy made his triumphant return to the top of the charts in February alongside PartyNextDoor with $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, the duo’s long-awaited joint album sold an impressive 246,000 units.
While Drake proved that he was not to be counted out in the wake of the war with Kendrick, K-Dot once again dominated with his GNX album. The effort returned to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 chart twice this year. GNX also outsold $$$ 4 U by a mere 500 album equivalent units in March.
After keeping his Vamp army riddled with anticipation for 1,067 days, Playboi Carti finally came through with Music on March 14, and his rabidly loyal fan base rose to the occasion in a major way. In pushing 298,000 units in the first seven days of its release, Carti’s Music solidified a position as the highest-streaming debut for any album in 2025 so far.
Other impressive sales numbers in 2025 include projects from Travis Scott and Jackboys, Clipse, Lil Wayne, the late great Mac Miller, Opium artist Ken Carson, the currently incarcerated Lil Durk and The Weeknd, among many others. Take a look at hip-hop’s biggest first-week project sales of 2025, according to Luminate, the independent data provider to the Billboard charts, below.
