Is 500,000 the new million?
As a shorthand for success selling albums in the streaming age, that may now be the case. The latest release to hit that adjusted milestone is Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House,” which had the equivalent of 521,500 sales in the United States over the last week, thanks to strong streaming numbers and the biggest vinyl take in three decades.
For years, moving a million copies of an album in one week was a coveted achievement for any blockbuster release. Since the 1990s it has been done at least 20 times, by acts like Adele, Whitney Houston, ’N Sync, Eminem and Taylor Swift.
But streaming has rejiggered the music industry’s math, and the prospect of selling a million copies of an album — or even getting a million “equivalent sales units,” a new yardstick that incorporates old-fashioned purchases and streaming clicks — has largely disappeared from the strategy book. No title has had a million sales in a single week since Swift’s “Reputation” nearly five years ago, and in the last 18 months, only four albums — including “Harry’s House” — have crossed 500,000.
“Harry’s House” had about as boffo an opening as any album can have now, with 247 million streams and 330,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. It had the best opening of any album since Adele’s “30,” which landed six months ago with 839,000. (Even Adele, whose previous album, “25,” started with nearly 3.4 million back in 2015, could no longer hit seven figures.)
Styles’s streaming number was strong, but less robust than the totals for recent albums by Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar. Where “Harry’s House” really shone was vinyl. It moved 182,000 copies on the LP format, more than any other album has sold in a single week since at least 1991, when Luminate’s predecessor, SoundScan, began keeping reliable sales data.
As Billboard noted, vinyl sales alone would have been enough to propel “Harry’s House” to No. 1. Each of the three solo albums by Styles, who rose to fame as part of the British boy band One Direction, has opened at the top of the chart. Styles’s song “As It Was” also returned to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, notching its fourth time at the top.
Also this week, several recent chart-toppers hold strong: Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” is No. 2, Lamar’s “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” is No. 3 and Future’s “I Never Liked You” is No. 4.
“American Heartbreak,” by the country singer-songwriter Zach Bryan — his first major-label album after two self-released recordings — opens at No. 5. Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 6, the 72-week-old album’s first time out of the Top 5 since December.
