Kendrick Lamar is on quite the winning streak. He performed in the Super Bowl halftime show, lives in Drake’s mind rent-free, and has sold a million copies of his latest album in a shade under three months.
Lamar is the first hip-hop recording artist to sell over one million units of his album, GNX, in 2025, according to chart data.
The album was released on Nov. 22, 2024, on Lamar’s boutique label, PGLang, with distribution under the Interscope banner (parent company is Universal Music Group).
.@kendricklamar‘s ‘GNX’ becomes the first hip-hop album to sell over 1 million units in the US in 2025. pic.twitter.com/mRGuZNzFjP
— chart data (@chartdata) March 23, 2025
The Compton native has seen a resurgence in his hip-hop recording career after engaging in a highly-contested rap battle with his nemesis, Canadian rapper Drake.
After several back-and-forths between the two rappers, Lamar’s single, “Not Like Us,” set the bar so high that many rap aficionados consider it the best diss record ever. The knockout punch was so severe that not only did Drake suffer, perhaps the greatest loss in hip-hop history, he filed a lawsuit against the label, which both artists records for, that released the song, Universal Music Group (UMG).
UMG recently filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit that Drake. He alleges that the label, along with iHeartMedia, artificially inflated the numbers and participated in a pay-per-click scheme to help promote the single. After finding out that iHeartMedia proved it did nothing wrong, Drake agreed to drop them from the lawsuit.
However, UMG responded to the “Push Ups” rapper’s suit by calling him a sore loser in a “rap battle that he provoked” against Lamar. The label also claimed that Drake’s “unjustified claims against UMG are no more than Drake’s attempt to save face for his unsuccessful rap battle with Lamar.”
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