De La Soul is back on the Billboard charts. The legendary hip-hop trio’s debut album re-enters the Billboard 200 after the catalog hit streaming services earlier this month.
The band’s first six albums were released on streaming services like Spotify, YouTube and Amazon Music on March 3. The albums also became available on CD, cassette and vinyl after long being out of print. Their 1989 debut album, “3 Feet High and Rising,” saw the most activity, as evidenced by the Billboard charts.
“3 Feet” re-entered the Billboard 200 at No. 15 after racking up 26,000 units for the week. Twenty-one thousand of the 26,000 units came from album sales, of which 14,000 were vinyls sold. The album earned 4,000 streaming equivalent album units. In addition to the Billboard 200, “3 Feet” entered the Billboard Top Rap Album chart at No. 4 and the Top R&B-Hip-Hop chart at No. 8.
Fan attention to many tracks from “3 Feet” helped put the album back on the charts. His most popular single, “Me, Myself and I,” had one million on-demand streams, easily the most of any De La Soul song since March 3. Two other tracks from “3 Feet”, “The Magic Number” and “Eye Know” were the second and third most streamed songs, with 618,000 and 511,000 streams respectively.
Accompanying music videos for “Me, Myself and I” and “Eye Know” have been re-uploaded to De La Soul’s official YouTube page. The remaining videos for “3 Feet”, “Say No Go” and “Potholes in My Lawn” are also available on YouTube.
Five other De La Soul albums available for streaming include 1991’s ‘De La Soul is Dead’, 1993’s ‘Buhloone Mindstate’, 1996’s ‘Stakes is High’, 2000’s ‘Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump’ and ‘AOI : Bionix” from 2001.” The title track “Stakes is High” is the band’s fourth most-streamed song, with 289,000 hits.
De La Soul announced in January that its Tommy Boy Records catalog would hit streaming services in March after a long battle with the label over sample permissions and revenue sharing. Sadly, on February 12, co-founder David “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur died weeks before the albums hit streaming services.
Surviving De La Soul members Kelvin “Posnudos” Mercer and Vincent “Maseo” Mason celebrated the streaming release and legacy of Jolicoeur at a March 2 launch party, “The DAISY Experience,” at the Webster Hall in New York. Hip-hop legends like Queen Latifah, Q-Tip, Common and comedian Dave Chappelle were in attendance.
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