J. Cole’s ‘4 Your Eyez Only’ Album Sells Just Under 500,000 Copies First Week

Clap for him. Not that such metrics would be of much concern for J. Cole considering the secretive, single-less and feature-less nature of his recently released album 4 Your Eyez Only, but the release has earned the rapper his fourth No. 1 album, with the third largest opening week sales of the year.

As Billboard reports, 4 Your Eyez Only has moved 492,000 equivalent album units in its first week of sales, 363,000 of which were traditional album sales. Only Drake's Views and Beyonce's Lemonade had bigger opening weeks, which debuted by selling 1.04 million and 653,000 copies, respectively.

Contributing to those first week numbers are 118,000 streaming equivalent albums, which equates to 51.7 million total streams of the album's songs. That gives Cole the second-largest streaming debut behind, again, Drake's Views. The album becomes just the third to surpass 100,000 equivalent plays after Views and Weeknd's Starboy eclipsed the mark earlier this year.

The numbers represent a broader achievement for Cole as well, who joins Drake and DMX as the only rappers to see their first four studio albums go No. 1. Making it all the more impressive, Cole accomplishes the feat in just over five years time, his debut album Cole World: The Sideline Story, selling 217,000 copies in the fall of 2011. Every release since has increased in first week sales numbers.

Post Malone's Stoney was released on the same day and came in at No. 6 on the chart, selling 58,000 equivalent units first week, 19,000 of which were via traditional sales.

Here's What People Are Saying About J. Cole's '4 Your Eyez Only' Album