Lil Baby, the Atlanta rapper who turned to music after a stint in prison and became one of his hometown’s biggest new stars, has his third No. 1 album in three years this week with “It’s Only Me.” Meanwhile, the music industry is holding its collective breath for next week’s chart, in anticipation of a gigantic opening for Taylor Swift’s latest.
“It’s Only Me,” which features guest spots by Young Thug, Future, Jeremih and EST Gee, had the equivalent of 216,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. Most of its popularity is attributed to streaming, with the album totaling 289 million clicks in its first week out — the third-best streaming tally for a No. 1 album this year, after Bad Bunny (357 million) and Kendrick Lamar (343 million).
As impressive as Lil Baby’s numbers are, they have already been dwarfed by those for Swift’s “Midnights,” which was released on Friday and, after just one day, has already become the best-selling album released in 2022, with a strong possibility it could be the first album to open with more than one million equivalent sales in five years. (The last artist to do so? You guessed it, Taylor Swift, with “Reputation.”)
In its first day on sale, according to a report in Billboard citing early data from Luminate — which has a longstanding partnership with the magazine for its charts — “Midnights” sold more than 800,000 copies as a complete unit, exceeding the 620,000 copies sold so far of Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House,” which has been out for five months. A major factor in Swift’s success is her strategy of releasing the album in an array of collectible variants on physical media: in addition to its four standard versions on LP and CD, there is an exclusive version sold by Target, not to mention the surprise “3am Edition” released digitally with seven extra songs. (K-pop groups like BTS and Blackpink, of course, have been using this strategy for years.)
And those are just the numbers for old-fashioned sales. Both Spotify and Apple Music announced that “Midnights” had broken first-day streaming records on those services, and the album’s numbers are holding strong: On Spotify, for example, tracks from “Midnights” take up 18 of the top 20 spots on its daily U.S. streaming chart as of Monday.
Also on this week’s album chart, Red Hot Chili Peppers open at No. 3 with “Return of the Dream Canteen,” their second LP this year, which had the equivalent of 63,000 sales.
Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” is in second place, Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4 and “The Highlights,” a hits compilation by the Weeknd, is No. 5.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
