With Seven Weeks at No. 1, Morgan Wallen Breaks a Chart Record

“Dangerous” has now logged seven weeks at No. 1, the longest consecutive run at the top by any album since Drake’s “Views” five years ago. “Dangerous” is also the only country LP to spend its first seven weeks at No. 1 in the 64-year history of the Billboard 200, the magazine’s flagship album chart. (Other big country albums, like Garth Brooks’s “Ropin’ the Wind,” from 1991, and Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Some Gave All,” from 1992, have racked up more weeks at No. 1 over all, but not in their first seven weeks out.)

Last week, “Dangerous” had the equivalent of 89,000 sales in the United States, including 111 million streams and 7,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Since it came out, “Dangerous” — which contains 30 songs, with three more on a “bonus” version — has had the equivalent of just over one million sales in the United States, including 1.1 billion streams.

Wallen’s fans have clearly been devoted to him, even as his mullet-framed face has become a dart board target for criticism of the music industry’s troubled history with race, particularly in the country genre. But there is another explanation for the continued success of “Dangerous”: Nothing else has come along to supplant it.

For the last seven weeks, Wallen’s biggest competition has come from weeks- or months-old albums by Taylor Swift, Pop Smoke and Lil Durk, and from new releases by Foo Fighters, the Memphis rapper Pooh Shiesty, the RB singer Jazmine Sullivan and the boy band Why Don’t We, none of which has opened higher than No. 3. The only new title to make it as high as No. 2 was a hits compilation from the Weeknd, released to coincide with his appearance at the Super Bowl.

Will Wallen land an eighth week at No. 1? His album’s pace is slowing. But the arriving new releases — by Julien Baker, Madison Beer, Jimmy Edgar and Willie Nelson — don’t include any obvious blockbusters.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/arts/music/morgan-wallen-dangerous-album-no-1.html