Kendrick Lamar’s breakthrough sophomore album has officially joined the ranks of the longest charting LPs in Billboard 200 history.
As of the issue dated August 4, Lamar’s ‘good kid, m.A.A.d city’ has been listed on the Billboard 200 (America’s best-sellers list) for 300 consecutive weeks. It’s just the 22nd album to hit this milestone. Among hip-hop releases, it’s only the fourth project with such credentials. It joins three efforts (all by Eminem): “Curtain Call: The Hits”, “The Eminem Show” and “Recovery”.
Observant chart watchers will also note it’s the first major-label debut by a hip-hop artist to achieve such a feat.
‘city’ is the fourth project to join the club this year, following Lana Del Rey’s ‘Born to Die’ (January), The Beatles’ ‘1’ (January) and most recently Imagine Dragons’ ‘Night Visions’ (July).
‘good kid, m.A.A.d city’ garnered critical and commercial success upon release in October 2012. Positioned against Taylor Swift’s blockbuster ‘Red’, it debuted and peaked at #2 on the Billboard 200 with 242,000 sold and went on to sell over 1.7 million pure copies. It has since been certified 3x Platinum by the RIAA.
The album is ranked at #116 on the latest Billboard 200 issue (+2) as it shifts another 7,000 units (down less than 1%). Of those units, nearly 1,300 stem from pure album sales and the majority of the rest come courtesy of 7.6 million weekly streams.
CHART DATA 
The ‘pure copies’/’pure sales’ phrases need to go, but unfortunately this blog/Twitter account seems incapable of doing so. The phrases are silly and already sound outdated (please note that Billboard has stopped using them), and they implicitly reify the no-longer-existent primacy of commercial configurations that are currently on a dramatic decline and will likely never recover.
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Thanks for the comment. Please note that Billboard mentions both pure sales and units regularly. This post mentions both as well.
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