Travis Scott Debuts at No. 1 With the Year’s Biggest Week for Hip-Hop

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 individuals have been crushed to dying and lots of extra have been injured.

The authorities investigated Scott’s function, however in June prosecutors introduced {that a} grand jury had declined to indict Scott and two pageant officers. A variety of civil lawsuits in opposition to Scott and pageant organizers, nonetheless, 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 offered as full bundle, in accordance with the monitoring service Luminate. That was by far the largest opening for any hip-hop album this 12 months.

Scott gave an album-release live performance on Monday on the Circus Maximus in Rome, which featured a shock visitor: Ye, previously often called Kanye West, who was making his first dwell look after he made a collection of antisemitic remarks final fall. Those incidents resulted in his being largely exiled from the music enterprise, and his profitable trend partnerships with Adidas and Balenciaga have 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 apply was distorting the charts grew loud sufficient that in 2020 Billboard largely ceased counting bundles on its charts. But followers stored 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” offered in album kind, 111,000 have been digital downloads, 63,000 have been CDs and 79,000 have 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 large drops in streaming and obtain gross sales.