On the latest Billboard 200 albums chart (dated July 22), DJ Khaled’s Gratefulspent a second week at No. 1, earning 70,000 equivalent album units in the week ending July 6, according to Nielsen Music. It was down 53 percent as compared to its premiere frame, when it started with 149,000 units. Elsewhere in the new top 10, Calvin Harris’ Funk Wave Bounces Vol. 1 debuted at No. 2 and Stone Sour’s Hydrograd bowed at No. 8.
The Billboard 200 chart ranks the week’s most popular albums based on their overall consumption. That overall unit figure combines pure album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA).
Now, let’s take a closer look at some of the action on the latest Billboard 200 chart:
— Soundtrack, Baby Driver: Music From the Motion Picture – No. 27 — The soundtrack zooms up the list (141-27) with 14,000 units (up 168 percent), nearly all from traditional album sales. The surge follows the film’s first full week in theaters, after it opened on June 28.
— Chris Stapleton, Traveller - No. 29 — Chris Stapleton’s former No. 1, Traveller, gallops 38-29 with 14,000 units earned (up 10 percent). The set sold another 8,000 copies in the latest tracking week, bringing its cumulative sum to over 2 million (2.002 million). Traveller is the most recently released country set to sell at least 2 million copies since Luke Bryan’s Crash My Party hit the threshold in the week ending July 13, 2014. Traveller bowed in May 2015, Crash in August 2013. The latter has sold 2.7 million and is Bryan’s best-selling album.
— Superfruit, Future Friends: Part One (EP) - No. 33 — The Pentatonix spinoff act Superfruit debuts at No. 33 on the Billboard 200 with its debut EP, Future Friends Part One. The duo comprises two-fifths of Pentatonix: Mitch Grassi and Scott Hoying. The non-a cappella EP bows with 13,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending July 6, according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, 12,000 were album sales.
Superfruit follows the solo projects of Pentatonix’s Avi Kaplan and Kevin Olusola onto the Billboard 200. Olusola’s The Renegade EP hit No. 52 in 2015, while Kaplan’s EP release as Avriel & The Sequoias, Sage and Stone, reached No. 127 earlier this month. Pentatonix’s fifth member, Kirstin Maldonado, released her debut EP, Love, on July 14.
Pentatonix has sold 4.9 million albums, earned 1.4 billion on-demand streams and scored seven top 10 releases on the Billboard 200, including two No. 1s.
— Beach House, B-Sides and Rarities - No. 137 — As this new collection bows at No. 137 on the Billboard 200, it also launches at No. 1 on the Vinyl Albumschart. It sold nearly 3,000 copies on vinyl LP – of its total 5,000 sold for the week. The band has been a consistently strong seller on vinyl: 27 percent of the act’s total sales are on LP (181,000 of 666,000 total sales).
— The Beach Boys, 1967: Sunshine Tomorrow – No. 145 — The archival release grants the band its 52nd charting effort on the tally, as it bows with 5,000 units earned. The group logged its first entries on the tally way back on Aug. 17, 1963, when Surfin’ U.S.A. and Surfin’ Safari debuted at Nos. 15 and 68, respectively.
— Neil Diamond, All-Time Greatest Hits – No. 181 — Since the latest sales and streaming tracking week ended on July 6 and included Independence Day (July 4), a number of albums make gains likely due to the patriotic holiday, including Neil Diamond’s All-Time Greatest Hits (a re-entry at No. 181). Fittingly, Diamond’s biggest-selling song of the week was “America,” with 6,000 sold (up 573 percent). The tune is on All-Time Greatest Hits, which collected 5,000 equivalent album units for the week (up 31 percent).
