After a year in 2024, it turns out to be crucial for hip-hop, with the upward trend in sales of rap games continuing into 2025, with some of the highest performers in the genre taking the helm.
Lil Baby started the year in January, and his first album was nearly three years old, Wham. 15 Track LP moved 140,000 equivalent album units in the first week, marking the fourth consecutive project of the Atlanta rapper, ranking No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album rankings. Wham also found out in particular that the young thug released his first publicly released verse from prison on the track “Dum, Dumb and Dumber”, which also features the future.
When Drake and Kendrick Lamar go from diss track to the most massive rap beef in court and then go to stages like the Super Bowl Lix Lix Hemftime Show, the two MCs are still at the top of the field in 2025 and have album sales to prove it. When Drizzy returned to the top of the charts with the PartyNextdoor with $OME$exy$ongs 4 U, the duo’s long-awaited joint album sold an impressive 246,000 units.
Although Drake proved that he couldn’t count him after the war with Kendrick, K-dot once again proved that he was number one on the Billboard 200 list in March at GNX in 2024. At the time, GNX exceeded $$$4U of the same unit of just 500 albums.
After 1,067 days of expectation to keep the upper, Playboi Carti finally arrived on March 14 with music, and the avid loyal fan base rose into the occasion in a big way. Carti’s music solidified the highest streaming debut of any album to date when it pushed 298,000 units in its first seven days of release.
At the Billboard 200 for three consecutive weeks, Playboi Carti was beaten only by his own opium signer Ken Carson. Carson’s latest album, More Chaos, was released on April 11, and sold 59,500 eaus this week, which proved to be enough to land at the top of the same coveted album chart.
Other impressive sales figures for 2025 include projects like the late Great Mac Miller, currently incarcerated Lil Durk and Weeknd.
Check out the biggest 2025 first week project sales below.
