Drake’s ‘Scorpion’ Is the Year’s Biggest Album. But Can You Find It in Stores?

NEW YORK — By almost every metric, Drake’s fifth LP, “Scorpion,” is a blockbuster. In the first three days after its release June 29, it logged enough streams (435 million) to beat a record set by Post Malone over a full week. After two weeks, it reached rarefied territory in today’s music industry: more than 1 million equivalent album sales.

But can you find a physical copy in New York City? The answer: Not so easily.

Copies of “Scorpion” — CDs only for now; plans for a vinyl release have not yet been announced — became available July 13. That means the bulk of “Scorpion” consumption has taken place on streaming services, where 1,250 paid streams and 3,750 free streams equal one album; the rest were downloads. Its CDs haven’t registered on the charts yet, and according to Nielsen, which tracks music-industry data, “Scorpion” sold 8,000 physical copies from July 13 through 17 — a relatively microscopic figure that’s a powerful reminder of how little some artists need physical sales to drive their success.

CD sales have continued to slide as streaming booms, particularly for rap artists, who constantly set and break records and dominate playlists on services including Spotify and Apple Music. Several Top 10 albums on Billboard’s chart this year never received a physical release at all, including Cardi B’s “Invasion of Privacy” and XXXTentacion’s “?”; for Migos and the Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z), physical copies were an afterthought, arriving weeks after their albums hit the charts. And an attempt to track down copies of the year’s biggest LP in 16 stores that sell new music in the city proved challenging. Only six stores had them, and prices ranged from $17.99 to $20.99. (A monthly subscription to Spotify, Apple Music or Tidal costs $9.99.)

Representatives from the stores said they had sold around 16 to 18 total copies. Several salespeople said they had received some sort of inquiry about a physical copy, either CD or vinyl, of Drake’s “Scorpion” before its release, which they deemed unusual.

“One person asked, which in this day and age, is kind of a lot,” said Chris Woldt, a manager at a Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn Heights. An FYE in Queens received more requests: “Before we had them, people kept asking, ‘Do you have it, do you have it?'” said Michael Jacob, an assistant manager. And multiple customers called Record Mart Times Square and Target at Albee Square in Brooklyn requesting the album, sales associates said.

In the stores, Drake’s fiercest competition has been the K-pop boy band BTS.

BTS has been “huge, way bigger than Drake,” in terms of CD sales, said Jacob, who works at the last of FYE’s stores in the city (Virgin Megastore left New York in 2009, and Tower Records vanished in 2006). Many teenagers have been showing up to buy the group’s album “Love Yourself,” and FYE has sold out of it a few times. In May, the seven-member band became the first K-pop act to reach No.1 on the Billboard album chart.

But FYE, an entertainment variety store that sells items ranging from “Jurassic Park” T-shirts to Bluetooth gadgets, had also sold the most copies of “Scorpion” of all the stores surveyed — six between Sunday and Tuesday. It also still had 28 copies on hand, seven of them on display.

At Rough Trade in Williamsburg, a warehouse record store complete with its own coffee shop, “Scorpion” was shelved high up on a wall next to DJ Khaled’s “Grateful” and Nipsey Hussle’s “Victory Lap.” The store had three copies on display Tuesday and had sold three so far.

The Barnes & Noble in Union Square had stocked three copies of “Scorpion” and still had two copies left Tuesday at 9 a.m., said a sales clerk, who added that CDs from John Coltrane and Kamasi Washington, the most popular in recent weeks, have drawn an older crowd.

Academy Records & CDs, a store that specializes in used music but still sells new releases, will probably not stock Drake’s new album. Ordering new hip-hop often means taking a chance because it doesn’t always sell, an employee, Ari Finkel, said, standing among customers bustling around the shop midday Monday. But representatives from a few other small record stores, and two locations of Urban Outfitters — which carries Kanye West and J. Cole albums on vinyl — said they planned to have “Scorpion” in stock once it is released on that format. Vinyl sales have been surging in recent years; according to Nielsen’s midyear report, they have increased 19 percent, to 7.6 million, so far in 2018.

Record Mart Times Square, a store specializing in Latin music, located underground in the Times Square subway station, had a copy of Drake’s “Nothing Was the Same” on its shelves, but no CD of “Scorpion.” If an album is hot enough, when it comes out on vinyl, Record Mart will usually order a box, around 30 total, Sammy Quinones, an employee and DJ, said.

The store will most likely order Drake, he added.

“Drake still sells,” he said. “Drake and artists like him.”