LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 11: (L-R) Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Taylor Swift attend the … [+]
Ariana Grande leads the Billboard 200 for a second week with her new album Eternal Sunshine. The set shifted another 100,000 equivalent units in its second turn atop the all-encompassing ranking of the most-consumed full-lengths in the U.S. The title helped the pop singer snag a record last week when it debuted, but it’s one she won’t hold for very long.
Eternal Sunshine scored the largest debut on the Billboard 200 of 2024 when it arrived at No. 1. The set launched atop the tally with 227,000 equivalent units shifted.
That sum was large enough for Grande to nab this record from Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign. Just a few weeks before Eternal Sunshine arrived, their first collaborative project Vultures 1 opened in first place on the Billboard 200 with 148,000 equivalent units.
While Grande may currently claim the largest Billboard 200 debut of 2024, there’s a very good chance she won’t lay claim to this spot in the history books for much longer. There are a handful of releases on the horizon, and either of them–or perhaps both of them–will beat the starting sum that Eternal Sunshine managed.
In just a few days, Beyoncé will release her highly-anticipated new album Cowboy Carter. The title will almost certainly debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and it stands a great shot of besting Grande’s number.
In 2022, Beyoncé returned after a lengthy hiatus–at least when looking only at her release of solo albums–with Renaissance. The dance project debuted atop the Billboard 200 with 332,000 equivalent units, and even that was a small number for her.
Beyoncé’s previous two albums under her own name–Lemonade and her self-titled–both performed much, much better. The full-length she named after herself, which arrived in 2013, started with 617,000 digital sales. Its follow-up, Lemonade, hit No. 1 three years later with an even bigger figure, 653,000 units.
If, somehow, the masses don’t love Beyoncé’s take on country and Cowboy Carter misses Grande’s record, it will still only be a matter of weeks before another title bests that 227,000 equivalent units number. Taylor Swift is scheduled to release her new album The Tortured Poets Department in mid-April, and that will definitely claim this record.
Swift’s last album of original material, Midnights, started at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 1.578 million equivalent units. Recently, she also moved more than one million equivalent copies of 1989 (Taylor’s Version), a re-recorded take on her album 1989.
