A week after the K-pop band Stray Kids bested Bad Bunny on the Billboard 200 albums chart with their new collection “Maxident,” rapper Lil Baby does the same, debuting in the top spot with “It’s Only Me” for the tracking week that ended October 20. But Bad Bunny refuses to leave the top two despite three other major debuts in the higher reaches of the chart. Read more about this week’s Billboard 200 at Billboard.com.
In its debut week, “It’s Only Me” achieved 216,000 equivalent album units based on its combined album sales, individual track sales, and online streams. As is common for hip-hop, streaming accounts for the overwhelming majority of its units (209,000, which amounts to more than 288 million streams). Compare this to Lil Baby’s last two albums: “My Turn” launched in 2020 with 197,000 units (and as of last week’s chart was still in the top 20), and “The Voice of the Heroes,” his collab with Lil Durk, launched with 150,000 units in 2021. So this is a step-up for the 27-year-old musician.
Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” maintains its number-two position from last week, which means the collection has spent all of its first 24 weeks in the top two. But this one was a close call. The album’s 72,000 album units was only 9,000 ahead of this week’s third-place album, Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ debuting “Return of the Dream Canteen,” their second studio album this year, which achieved 63,000 units.
This week’s two other top-10 debuts were the rock band The 1975‘s “Being Funny in a Foreign Language” at number-seven and country singer Bailey Zimmerman’s “Leave the Light On” at number-nine. Hurricane Taylor Swift is coming, though. Expect next week’s chart to be ruled by her new album “Midnights,” at which point it’s possible she and Lil Baby will finally squeeze Bad Bunny from the top two.
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