XXXTentacion's 'Skins' Is No. 1 After Two Weeks of Chart Confusion

“Skins” (Bad Vibes Forever/Empire), XXXTentacion’s third album, reached the top spot with the equivalent of 132,000 sales in the United States last week, which includes 52,000 in sales of the full album and 122 million streams of its tracks on services like Spotify and Apple Music, according to Nielsen data reported by Billboard. It is the second time that XXXTentacion — who was awaiting trial on charges of battery, false imprisonment and witness tampering at the time of his death — has topped the chart, following his last album, “?,” in March.

Meek Mill’s “Championships” (Maybach/Atlantic), last week’s chart topper, fell one spot to No. 2 in its second week, and Michael Bublé's holiday album “Christmas” — a seasonal chart hit every year since its initial release in 2011 — is in third place.

On Tuesday, Billboard also announced the results of an audit of its album chart covering the week that ended Nov. 29, when Travis Scott’s four-month-old album “Astroworld” beat rapper 6ix9ine’s “Dummy Boy” for the top spot. Those results were immediately contested, with questions being raised over the data collected and processed by Nielsen — Billboard’s longtime partner on its charts — and the increasingly common practice of bundling albums with sales of concert tickets or merchandise, a tactic widely seen as a way for artists to boost their chart positions.

After a two-week review, no changes would be made, Billboard said, and Scott can keep his No. 1.

“In a historically close race,” Billboard said in a statement, “after a rigorous review of the process and the methodology by which the No. 1 ranking on last week’s Billboard 200 album chart was awarded to Travis Scott’s ‘Astroworld,’ we concluded that no correction was warranted.”

But questions about the chart’s methods and policies remain, and the industry maintains a close eye on the changes at Billboard, after a harassment scandal led to management shifts at the top of the business and editorial sides of the magazine.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.