Almost two years in the past, the profession of the rap star Travis Scott had appeared unsure after the disaster of his Astroworld Festival in Houston, the place 10 folks had been crushed to loss of life and a whole lot extra had been injured.
The authorities investigated Scott’s function, however in June prosecutors introduced {that a} grand jury had declined to indict Scott and two competition officers. Plenty of civil lawsuits towards Scott and competition organizers, nevertheless, stay pending.
That cloud was no deterrent to Scott’s followers, who’ve despatched the rapper’s newest album, “Utopia,” straight to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. It had the equal of 496,000 gross sales within the United States, together with 331 million streams and 252,000 copies bought as full package deal, in line with the monitoring service Luminate. That was by far the largest opening for any hip-hop album this yr.
Scott gave an album-release live performance on Monday on the Circus Maximus in Rome, which featured a shock visitor: Ye, previously often known as Kanye West, who was making his first dwell look after he made a sequence of antisemitic remarks final fall. Those incidents resulted in his being largely exiled from the music business, and his profitable style partnerships with Adidas and Balenciaga had been canceled.
When Scott launched his final album, “Astroworld,” in 2018, he was one of many music world’s kings of “bundling” — promoting followers an album that got here with live performance tickets or, notably in Scott’s case, merchandise like T-shirts, key chains and hats. Industry complaints that the observe was distorting the charts grew loud sufficient that in 2020 Billboard largely ceased counting bundles on its charts. But followers saved shopping for music-plus-collectibles packages, and three months in the past Billboard tweaked its guidelines as soon as once more, permitting what it calls “fan packs”: bodily copies of an album with a single merchandise merchandise.
Scott’s “Utopia” was launched in a wide range of collectible CD and vinyl variants, together with 15 deluxe boxed units and what Billboard deemed two compliant fan packs (a CD or vinyl LP that got here with a single merchandise of branded merchandise). Of the 252,000 copies “Utopia” bought in album type, 111,000 had been digital downloads, 63,000 had been CDs and 79,000 had been vinyl LPs, which Billboard mentioned is the largest week of vinyl gross sales for any R&B or hip-hop album since at the least 1991.
Also this week, Post Malone opens at No. 2 with “Austin,” which had the equal of 113,000 gross sales, together with 101 million streams. Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” holds at No. 3, the “Barbie” soundtrack is No. 4 and Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” is No. 5.
On the Hot 100 singles chart, Wallen’s “Last Night” returns to No. 1 for a fifteenth time, whereas Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which rode a wave of controversy and media protection to the highest spot for a single week, falls to No. 21 with massive drops in streaming and obtain gross sales.
Source: www.nytimes.com