In its first week, Billie Eilish’s debut full-length album is performing like a long-awaited release from a veteran superstar, according to initial sales and streaming numbers. A source indicates that Eilish’s “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” is likely to bow with a seven-day tally of 250,000 to 275,000 equivalent album units.
If those expectations hold, it would put Eilish’s album behind only Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next” on a list of the biggest 2019 album debuts to date.
The album is benefitting not just from strong streaming figures but a surprising amount of traditional album sales for a teen artist with a largely young fan base that didn’t grow up buying full albums. BuzzAngle Music tells Variety that in its first five days on sale, the Eilish project sold 75,000 albums, accounting for almost half its album-equivalent total. By contrast, the No. 2 album over that five day period, “Thank U, Next,” only had about one-twenty-fifth of its tally coming through traditional album sales.
But Eilish is no slouch on the streaming side, either. BuzzAngle Music says she racked up 118 million on-demand audio streams in those first five days out. That’s especially impressive given that five of the album’s 14 tracks had already been out and available as singles prior to the album launch.
The highest streamed Eilish song over those first five days was a previously unreleased one, “Bad Guy,” which quickly emerged as a fan favorite. It accrued 19 million on-demand streams in that initial frame, followed by 16 million for the already-in-circulation single “Bury a Friend.” Even the opening dialogue track “!!!!!!!,” which consists almost entirely of Eilish announcing that she is taking out her Invisalign retainers, was streamed nearly 7 million times in the first five days, per BuzzAngle.
George Strait’s “Honky Tonk Time Machine” was the other big release coming out March 29, with, typically for a country album, traditional album sales accounting for most of the 24,000 album equivalent units it earned in its first five days.
Source : Variety
