Playboi Carti is back at the top of the charts, but he’s not entirely happy with how the numbers are being reported.
According to Billboard, his latest album, MUSIC, officially debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 298,000 album-equivalent units in the U.S. during its first week. That’s massive by any measure, marking it the biggest week of 2025 for a Hip Hop release thus far. It’s also the biggest streaming week for a rap project in nearly two years.
Still, Carti isn’t convinced that the industry got the full picture. In response to the news, he took to social media to say that MUSIC actually moved 320,000 units in its first week. While no clarification was provided, some suggested that the reported total might’ve missed some of the album’s digital and physical sales.
This isn’t the first time Carti pushed back on how his music is being counted. Before the album dropped, HITS Daily Double predicted that he’d move 250,000 units in the first week — but that estimate left out physical sales, even though Carti was selling a wide range of CDs and merch bundles through his official website. After an account on X pointed this out, Carti reposted the message in a since-deleted tweet with a simple response: “IT IS ODD.”
Despite the back and forth, there’s no denying the album’s commercial success. Of the 298,000 official units, 283,000 came from streaming, or roughly 384 million on-demand streams across the album’s 30-track iteration. That figure not only landed MUSIC at No. 1 on Billboard's Top Streaming Albums chart, it also made it the most-streamed album in a single day on Spotify so far this year.
The impact of Playboi Carti’s MUSIC album
To put those numbers into context, the only album to have a bigger debut week in 2025 so far is The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow, which opened with 490,000 units. And when it comes to streaming, MUSIC just pulled off the biggest week for any album since Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department racked up 428 million streams back in May 2024. As for rap specifically, Carti’s project scored the genre’s biggest streaming week since Drake’s For All the Dogs debuted with 514 million streams in October 2023.
On the sales side, Carti moved 14,500 digital albums, placing him at No. 3 on the Top Album Sales chart. Just 500 units came from track-equivalent sales, which factor in digital song purchases. What makes the numbers even more impressive is that MUSIC wasn’t available physically during its first week — fans could only buy it as a digital download, either in standard form or in one of three variants from Carti’s webstore, which included bonus tracks.
As Billboard further explained, physical editions are still on the way. At least eight variants of CDs and deluxe box sets with branded merch have been available for pre-order since September 2024 and are expected to begin shipping soon. That means Carti could see a second wave of sales in the near future, depending on how those versions perform.
So, while Carti and chart-watchers might disagree on the exact totals, MUSIC is still one of the biggest rap releases in years. The AWGE star simply isn’t afraid to make sure everyone knows it. If you missed REVOLT’s breakdown of how Carti’s style, mystique and fanbase turned MUSIC into a full-blown phenomenon, catch up here.