Key Takeaways

• Album Success: Cardi B’s Am I the Drama? debuted at number one on the Billboard 200.
• Streaming Impact: The album achieved 110,000 units from streaming, totaling 145.72 million streams.
• Historical Milestone: Cardi B is the first female rapper to debut at number one with her first two albums.
• Sales Records: The album is among the top 11 for biggest first-week sales in female hip-hop history.

Cardi B‘s latest album has solidified her legacy as one of the greatest (if not most impactful) female rappers of all time.

Am I the Drama?, the Bronx superstar’s long-awaited sophomore effort, has debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 after earning 200,000 first-week units.

Of that figure, 110,000 came from streaming activity (145.72 million on-demand streams) while 88,000 was from pure sales.

Cardi is now the first female rapper in history to debut atop the chart with her first two albums after her blockbuster 2018 debut Invasion of Privacy entered at number one with 255,000 first-week sales.

Not even her bitter rival Nicki Minaj, whose 2010 debut Pink Friday initially charted at number two on the Billboard 200, managed to achieve the feat.

Bardi also boasts the highest sales tally by a female rapper in 2025 and fourth-most among all rappers, behind only Playboi Carti (MUSIC, 298,000), Drake ($ome $exy $ongs 4 U, 246,000) and Travis Scott (JackBoys 2, 232,000).

In the scope of female hip-hop history, Am I the Drama? is already one of the biggest debuting albums, placing 11th on the all-time list of biggest first-week sales.

Leading that list is Lauryn Hill‘s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill with 422,000 copies, followed by Nicki’s Pink Friday with 375,000 and Missy Elliott‘s Under Construction with 259,000.

If Am I the Drama? reclaims the top spot on next week’s chart, Cardi will become the first female rapper since Lauryn Hill in 1998 to top the Billboard 200 for consecutive weeks.

Am I the Drama? is also making its presence felt in terms of plaques having recently been certified platinum by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), an award given to records that have sold at least a million units domestically.

That’s largely thanks to the inclusion of previously released singles “WAP” and “Up,” which are already 9x platinum and 5x platinum, respectively.

If you’re wondering how an album that sold 200,000 copies has been certified platinum, that’s because Billboard no longer counts existing singles towards a project’s first-week sales.