The Contenders is a midweek column that looks at artists aiming for the top of the Billboard charts, and the strategies behind their efforts. This week (for the upcoming charts dated August 5), Travis Scott could score the biggest debut for a rap album in 2023 so far with his first album in five years.
Travis Scott, Utopia (Cactus Jack/Epic): There must have been a little anxiety in the Travis Scott camp as he geared up for July’s Utopia release. Not only was it Scott’s first album since the blockbuster Astroworld five years earlier, but it was his first following the catastrophic stage rush at his 2021 Astroworld Fest, which left 10 dead and cast a huge shadow over Scott’s career. Subsequent releases (like the 2022 Pharrell collab “Down in Atlanta”) failed to make much chart impact, and there seemed to at least be a chance that a similar fate would befall Utopia.
From its early returns on streaming, however, it seems like Scott & co. needn’t have worried. Billboard reported yesterday that the album posted a massive 266.21 million official on-demand U.S. streams in its first five days of release. That puts it just a few million short of the full-first-week total for Taylor Swift’s Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) (269.33 million), which currently stands as the second-biggest streaming week of 2023 so far, and about 83 million short of Astroworld’s first-week tally (349.43 million) with two days still unaccounted for.
In addition to its robust streaming debut, the album should also sell well in its physical release, thanks largely to a wide variety of options. There are 15 deluxe boxed sets for the album, each containing a different piece of clothing with either a copy of the CD or vinyl LP – and a different cover with each box for the CD or vinyl LP contained inside. There are also two Fan Pack offers — where the customer could buy a piece of branded clothing and a copy of the physical album together for a discounted price, or choose to buy the items separately if they wanted. And of course, there’s the stand–alone physical album – available in five different CDs or five different vinyl LPs (the same physical albums contained in the boxed sets noted above) — and a digital edition, discounted to $4.99 in Scott’s webstore. (Physical copies of the album were only for sale through the webstore, as the set is currently unavailable at any other retailers.)
It should all add up to one of the biggest debuts for any album in 2023 – and almost certainly the highest first-week number for an R&B/hip-hop album this year. (The current top tally is held by Lil Uzi Vert’s Pink Tape, which debuted with 167,000 equivalent album units, including 210.39 million in streaming.)
Post Malone, Austin (Mercury/Republic): Three or four years ago, a first-week race between Travis Scott and Post Malone on the Billboard 200 would have been among the most exciting (and likely the closest) that pop music could’ve offered, as two of the most consistently successful recording artists of the late ‘10s. But while the intervening years may not have dampened Scott’s first-week album numbers much, they’ve had a bigger impact on Post Malone’s performance – his dour 2022 album Twelve Carat Toothache only posted about a quarter of the first-week units as 2019’s Hollywood’s Bleeding, and was relegated to a No. 2 debut on the Billboard 200.
That chart position may again be the best-case scenario for 2023’s Austin, Post Malone’s return to more upbeat pop music, albeit more guitar-based than the trap beats he made his stardom rapping over. From the early returns, the set is streaming well, but nowhere near as well as Utopia – on the Spotify Daily Top Songs USA chart for the Friday when both albums debuted (July 28), every track from Austin appeared on the top 200, but the album’s highest-finishing song still placed lower than the worst-performing Utopia cut.
Nonetheless, the album should still stream and sell well – significantly better than any non-Scott new release this week. The latter portion will be helped by two Fan Pack offers (similar to the ones Scott offers for Utopia), as well as a range of additional physical releases that includes three vinyl variants and a cassette option. (The set was also reissued mid-week in a deluxe edition, including the new bonus track “Joy.”)
