Frank Ocean: Blonde debuts atop Billboard 200

Frank Ocean has notched the third-highest debut for a 2016 album, as his sophomore LP, Blonde, bows at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart with 276,000 equivalent album units.

According to Billboard, album rankings take into consideration “traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA)”, of which Blonde accumulated 232,000 and 44,000, respectively. Blonde trails Drake’s Views (1.04 million total, 852,000 TEA) and Beyoncé’s Lemonade (653,000 total, 485,000 TEA) as the third highest-debuting album of 2016 in the U.S.

Billboard reports that Blonde‘s tracks were collectively streamed 65.4 million times exclusively on Apple Music throughout the week following its Aug. 20 release.

Blonde, an independent album which Ocean distributed himself, tallied a considerable uptick in sales from the singer’s first album, Channel Orange, which opened to 131,000 first-week sales for a No. 2 finish on the Billboard 200 back in 2012. It is the third indie album to top the U.S. chart this year, following Blink-182’s California and The Lumineers’ Cleopatra.

Check out the Billboard 200‘s top 10 albums for the week ending Aug. 25 in the chart, below. The full list will be published Tuesday morning on Billboard‘s website.

1. Blonde – Frank Ocean (276,000)

2. Views – Drake (77,000)

3. Suicide Squad: The Album – Various Artists (76,000)

4. I Told You – Trey Lorenz (52,000)

5. Brave Enough – Lindsey Stirling (49,000)

6. Blurryface – Twenty One Pilots (33,000)

7. 25 – Adele (28,000)

8. Anti – Rihanna (27,000)

9. Major Key – DJ Khaled (27,000)

10. Hamilton – Original Broadway Cast of Hamilton (23,000)