The latest Billboard album chart has been revealed, and Beyoncé has claimed two spots on it. The number one spot however has gone to Billie Eilish, whose album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? had been sitting at the number two spot for two weeks. As for Beyoncé, her two albums, Homecoming: The Live Album and Lemonade, have arrived at number four and nine, respectively.
Homecoming: The Live Album was a surprise album released by her on the day her Netflix documentary was launched. This film chronicles her journey through last year’s Coachella, where she became the first black woman to headline the event. This massive album consists of 36 live tracks, two spoken word interludes and two bonus tracks, I Been On and a cover of Maze’s Before I Let Go.
While it was pretty much expected that Homecoming: The Live Album will immediately make an entry into the top 10, what was pleasantly surprising was the rearrival of Lemonade into the charts. To give you a refresher, Lemonade was released by Beyoncé back in 2016 as an exclusive to her and Jay-Z’s streaming service, Tidal. It was only last week that the album was made freely available on other platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and others. This has led to its sudden spike in popularity.
Beyoncé’s move to release Lemonade exclusively via Tidal was criticised for several reasons. Prime among those were the high subscriptions prices of the service and the scarcity of actual devices in the market that could render the service’s high-fidelity sound to its fullest. The artist gave clues about moving away from such exclusivity through last year’s album with husband Jay-Z, titled Everything Is Love, which was exclusive to Tidal only for a few days.
If this week’s charts are any indicator, the spots for Homecoming: The Live Album and Lemonade will certainly be higher in next week’s Billboard database.
