, the series of Instagram Live beat battles curated by producers Swizz Beatz and Timbaland, has done much the same during the pandemic, with Erykah Badu and Jill Scott seeing a 217% increase in streams after their bout and Beenie Man and Bounty Killer enjoying a 216% boost after theirs.
Albums by men account for nine of the 10 titles on the list of 2020’s biggest records so far, with Eilish’s “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” the only album by a woman. Lil Baby’s “My Turn” is at No. 1 with a sales-and-streams equivalent of 1.47 million copies, followed not far behind by the Weeknd’s “After Hours” and Lil Uzi Vert’s “Eternal Atake” .
On streaming services, the year’s biggest single by some measure is “The Box,” the squeaky hip-hop hit by Compton’s Roddy Ricch, which has racked up more than 1 billion streams. Yet at radio “The Box” has been outpaced by Post Malone’s “Circles,” which Nielsen says has been heard by an audience numbering more than 2.2 billion.
New rock acts are having trouble competing with the genre’s pioneers: So far, no album released in 2020 has outperformed greatest-hits collections by Queen, Elton John, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Journey.