Sabrina Carpenter’s ascent is complete. Last week, she became the first artist since, ahem, The Beatles to have two songs debut within the top three spots on the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart. This week, the former Disney star scored her first No. 1 hit. Nice feat, which leads me to wonder: What’s she going to have in her bag for next week?
TOP SONGS:
One week after its debut at No. 2, Sabrina Carpenter's sweet pop confection "Please Please Please" has gone to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart — and it’s Carpenter’s first time hitting the top spot on the songs chart. (This song, by the by, should in no way be confused with the melancholic, classic Smiths B-side from 1984, "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want.")
Carpenter now has two singles in the top five right now: Her song “Espresso,” which was No. 3 last week (and put her in The Beatles’ company), has slipped to No. 4. Meanwhile, after five weeks in first place, Post Malone's "I Had Some Help," featuring Morgan Wallen, has fallen to the No. 2 position. The rest of the top five spots are currently occupied by Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" at No. 3 and Tommy Richman's "Million Dollar Baby" at No. 5.
TOP ALBUMS:
For a ninth straight week, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department remains at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart — which, as Billboard notes, marks Swift's 78th career week at No. 1, and continues her run as the solo artist with the most weeks in the top album spot since the Billboard 200 was first published in 1956.
As my esteemed colleague Stephen Thompson noted in this space last week, even Taylor Swift still has a little way to go before she surpasses The Beatles' all-time record, with 132 total weeks at No. 1. Even so, this week's triumph makes Swift the female artist to have the longest consecutive running No. 1 album after debuting atop the chart since Whitney Houston's album, Whitney, was released in 1987. (It spent 11 weeks in the top spot.)
At No. 2 this week is Billie Eilish's Hit Me Hard and Soft, an album which Billboard perhaps less than charitably but nonetheless accurately describes this week as a "non-mover," given that it only earned 84,000 equivalent album units this week.
That description may induce winces in Eilish's team, but she is not the only artist seeing soft numbers right now. Swift earned only 126,000 units this week — down from 2.61 million in Tortured Poets’ first week. Apparently, even hardcore Swifties may finally be approaching their saturation point.
It seems that a summer slump may well have begun for the recorded music business: Rapper and singer Don Toliver's Hardstone Psycho debuts at No. 3 (with a mere 76,500 equivalent album units this week); Wallen's One Thing at a Time remains at No. 4 (73,000 units). New Orleans hip-hop duo $uicideboy$ have landed their biggest chart numbers to date with New World Depression at No. 5 — which earned only 66,000 units.
WORTH NOTING:
Over on the Vinyl Albums chart, $uicideboy$ grabbed the No. 1 spot, with 16,000 albums sold across six different variants. (A brief history lesson: Selling colored vinyl — and before that, colored shellac — has been a marketing strategy in the label business since nearly the dawn of recorded music. As early as the 1910s, labels like Vocalion were pressing brightly colored 78s to attract consumers.)
But it’s not just New Orleans rap, or Taylor Swift, that is pulling fans’ attention right now: The No. 2 and No. 4 spots on the vinyl albums chart are currently occupied by the soundtracks to the films Twilight and The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which respectively came out in 2008 and 2009. Long live vampire nostalgia, I guess.
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