The release of a new album by Taylor Swift — whose “Lover” came out on Friday — practically serves as a memo to all other artists with records on the way: Get your album out before hers, or abandon any hope of reaching No. 1.

This week, the top three spots on Billboard’s album chart are new releases. The Atlanta rapper Young Thug reached No. 1 for the first time with “So Much Fun,” followed by the latest from Lionel Richie and a compilation playlist from the hip-hop label Quality Control Music. Come next week, they will all surely sit at least one rung lower.

Young Thug’s “So Much Fun” (300/Atlantic) reached the top almost entirely through streaming. According to Nielsen, songs from that album were played almost 168 million times in the United States last week, though the full album sold fewer than 5,000 copies.

Richie’s live album “Hello From Las Vegas” (Capitol) had the opposite pattern: Its 65,000 “equivalent sales” came almost entirely from fans getting the complete album — most through a deal that bundled copies with tickets to his latest tour. “Hello From Las Vegas” had just 108,000 streams, by far the lowest streaming number for a Top 10 album this year. (In May, Sammy Hagar’s “Space Between” reached No. 4 with 263,000.)