Kanye West has set a new chart record in America with his latest, much-discussed album The Life of Pablo. According to new data, it has become the first album to top the US Billboard chart with the majority of its ‘sales’ derived from streaming.

Billboard reported on Sunday (April 10th) that Kanye’s seventh album, which had a highly unorthodox roll-out back in February, racked up 94,000 equivalent album units in the week ending April 7th, meaning it was enough to beat Chris Stapleton’s album Traveller to number one.

Kanye WestKanye West's 'The Life of Pablo' is Number 1 in the US through streaming alone

It’s pretty much exactly two months since the 38 year old rapper released The Life of Pablo on Tidal, tweeting soon afterwards that it would “never” be for conventional sale and would remain an exclusive to the subscription-only streaming service in perpetuity.

Over the following weeks, Kanye made several edits and revisions to the album’s running sequence, even adding and taking away some samples and guest appearances to the tracks, suggesting that the album would be a kind of living, constantly changing art installation available digitally.

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However, signs that the rapper might be changing his stance came in late March when the tracks ‘Famous’ and ‘I Love Kanye’ were made available on Apple Music and Spotify, with the announcement finally coming that the whole album was now finished and would be available via other streaming services from April 1st.

The achievement is nevertheless impressive, as it’s still not possible to ‘buy’ the album in any conventional sense, either physically or as a download and remains unavailable via iTunes or in any bricks-and-mortar record stores. That it managed to reach the top of the Billboard charts on the power of streaming alone is startling.

However, The Life of Pablo still couldn’t break the outright streaming record for a single album in one week. That record is still held by Justin Bieber’s Purpose, which notched up just over 100 million streams late last year in its debut week. Kanye’s effort came very close, with Billboard reporting 99 million streams.

More: Kanye West’s ‘The Life of Pablo’ to appear on other streaming sites than Tidal from April 1