Fans haven’t gotten enough of SZA’s SOS. People love the album so much that it spent two consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 chart.
According to Billboard, the the project’s sales went down 43 percent from its opening debut, but the 180,000 album-equivalent units sold in the week ending on Dec. 22 are still enough to take the No. 1 spot.
Of the aforementioned sales, 179,000 were streaming-equivalent album units, equaling 236.52 million on-demand official streams, which is down 42 percent from its opening week, and less than 1,000 units were track-equivalent albums, which decreased by 49 percent.
SZA dropped SOS on Dec. 9, and the 23-track body of work features Don Toliver, Phoebe Bridgers, Travis Scott and the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard. The project received high praise before it even came out. Prior to the release, three singles debuted on the Billboard Hot 100: “Good Days,” “Shirt” and “I Hate U.” The streams from those songs alone made SOS eligible for Gold certification.
SOS is the Top Dawg Entertainment artist’s second studio album and her first-ever to debut at No. 1. In fact, the chart-topping album broke records in its opening week. According to Chart Data, the R&B singer’s 318,000 album-equivalent units moved in the U.S. in the week ending Dec. 15 accumulated the most streams ever in a week span for an R&B album. It is the third-largest streamed album in 2022 and has the second-largest streaming week ever for an album by a female artist. This week, SOS broke another record. This is the first album by a Black female artist to spend its first two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 since Beyoncé did it in 2013 with her self-titled album.
SZA’s SOS comes more than five years after her June 2017 release Ctrl. The album debuted and peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. It earned 3.9 million album-equivalent units and has yet to leave the weekly Billboard 200, going 288 consecutive weeks.