Month: September 2023

Olivia Rodrigo has the guts and the glory as her sophomore album powers to No. 1 in Australia.

Rodrigo’s Guts (via Geffen/Universal) debuts at the summit of the ARIA Albums Chart, published Friday, Sept. 15, while each of its 12 tracks impact the top 50 on the national singles survey, including two of the top three.

Guts, the followup to 2021’s Sour, which logged eight non-consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the ARIA Chart, is the only new release to appear in this week’s top 50.

Doja Cat and her hit “Paint The Town Red” (RCA/Sony) prevents a Rodrigo double, as former leader “Vampire” flies 7-2 on the ARIA Singles Chart, ahead of “Bad Idea, Right,” vaulting 24-3 for a new peak.

Further down the list, Guts cuts “Get Him Back” bows at No. 6 and “All-American Bitch” opens its account at No. 10, lifting Rodrigo’s tally of top tier hits to eight (including three No. 1s), all racked-up since January 2021.

Meanwhile, Sour finds fresh chart legs, rebounding 18-8 on the latest ARIA tally.

Albums by the Weeknd (The Highlights at No. 2, Starboy at No. 4 via Universal), Travis Scott (Utopia at No. 3 via Epic/Sony) and Zach Bryan (Zach Bryan at No. 5 via Warner) are unchanged from the previous chart cycle.

Veteran alternative rock favorites Grinspoon enjoy a return to the albums chart, just weeks out from the start of their Easy Detention Tour. The two-time ARIA Award-winning band’s Easy reenters at No. 46, just one place ahead of New Detention, both via Universal. Easy peaked out at No. 4 in 1999, while New Detention hit No. 2 in 2002, two of the group’s eight top 10 albums in their homeland. Grinspoon’s national trek is scheduled to start Oct. 29 on the Gold Coast.

Over on the ARIA Singles Chart, Doja Cat’s “Paint The Town Red” enters a fourth consecutive week at No. 1, while BTS’ V debuts at No. 54 with “Slow Dancing” (ING/Universal).

It’s all love in Diddy’s world. The music legend and business mogul unveiled his latest studio effort, The Love Album: Off the Grid, on Friday (Sept. 15).

The jam-packed feature lineup includes notable names such as The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, Mary J. Blige, Jazmine Sullivan, H.E.R, Summer Walker, Babyface, John Legend, Teyana Taylor and more. “Music is my first love, and music has given me a second chance at life, so stepping back into the studio to make this album has been a soulful experience that brought me closer to myself and my purpose,” Diddy said in a press release. “This album wasn’t created to feed an algorithm or be relevant with the trends of the times — it was created to touch souls and freely express my story with the best artists, writers and producers shaping the future of R&B.”

This project marks his first official release under his new label, Love Records, and his first solo album since 2006’s Press Play. Since then, he dropped his 2010 collaborative project Last Train to Paris with Dawn Richard and Kalenna Harper as Dirty Money, and his 2015 mixtape MMM (Money Making Mitch).

Diddy is Billboard‘s most recent cover star, and he opened up about the inspiration behind the new release. “This isn’t just an R&B album; it’s an R&B movie [about love],” he said of his project, which he executive-produced and curated. “It’s probably one of the biggest collections of talent ever, all unified on one album. And I happen to be blessed to have The Weeknd’s last feature. The song talks about being unique, in a sense — telling your ex-girl that another one of me won’t come around.”

Listen to The Love Album: Off the Grid in full below.

Demi Lovato is ready to rock! The star unveiled a new album on Friday (Sept. 15) featuring reimagined, rock versions of their old tracks, fittingly titled Revamped.

The 10-track LP features some of their biggest hits (“Heart Attack,” “Sorry Not Sorry”) alongside fan favorites (“La La Land,” “Tell Me You Love Me”), all with amped-up guitars and a spotlight on Lovato’s powerhouse vocals. “It just feels really good,” they told Billboard. “I’m really proud of the work that we did, and I’m excited for the songs to be out there.”

Lovato continued, “I think it reignited an excitement inside of me for those songs. Like, take ‘Give Your Heart a Break,’ for example: I got really tired of performing that one live, because it had been in my catalog for so long, and it didn’t really reflect any sound that I had anymore. Even when I went more R&B-pop, it just wasn’t the kind of sound I was looking for anymore, because it was just so pop. But when we put together the rock version, I was suddenly having a really fun time on stage performing it.”

The 30-year-old singer performed a slew of her rocked-out hits at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards earlier in the week, including “Heart Attack,” “Sorry Not Sorry” and “Cool for the Summer.”

The new album follows Lovato’s 2022 album, Holy Fvck, which introduced their rock musical abilities to fans. The album peaked at No. 7 on the all-genre Billboard 200 albums chart upon its release, and topped the Billboard Hot Rock Albums chart on September 3, 2022.

Listen to Revamped in full below.

Grammy winner Maren Morris has released a duo of songs, “The Tree” and “Get The Hell Out of Here,” under the collective project title The Bridge, today (Friday, Sept. 15).

Though she is still hard at work on her next full-length project, Morris said she felt the two songs “deserved a moment of their own.”

Morris said in an Instagram post that the dual song release “honors where I’ve been and [sic] but also feels like a forward step into the sun.”

Morris added, “As I’ve been working on my record nonstop this year, I realized these two songs deserved a moment of their own – a story in their own right, written a day apart from each other – a tender duo and bridge to my next album. I welcome, celebrate and grieve the changes that have happened these last few years and these two songs say it better than I ever could in a caption or interview….hope you enjoy these. ‘Wherever I’m going, I hope I’m not the only one.’”

Morris also noted in a separate Instagram photo that an accompanying two-part music video for The Bridge will premieres Friday (Sept 15) at 10 a.m. ET.

Morris’ upcoming full-length album will follow her 2022 project Humble Quest and her 2019 album GIRL, which won a CMA Award for album of the year. GIRL‘s key song, “The Bones,” won Morris single and song of the year honors in 2020, while Morris also picked up her first CMA female vocalist of the year win.

Slowdive scores its first top 10 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart (dated Sept. 16) as the band’s new album Everything Is Alive debuts at No. 3. The set launches with 12,000 copies sold in the U.S. in the week ending Sept. 7, according to Luminate. It’s the best sales week yet for the British group, and its second chart entry, having previously topped out at No. 22 with its self-titled release 2017.

Also in the top 10 of the new Top Album Sales chart, the late Jimmy Buffett’s 1985 best-of album Songs You Know by Heart: Jimmy Buffett’s Greatest Hit(s) re-enters the list at No. 1 – its first week atop the 32-year-old tally. Plus, YouTuber and Twitch streamer Dream sees his debut effort To Whoever Wants to Hear launch at No. 8.

Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart ranks the top-selling albums of the week based only on traditional album sales. The chart’s history dates back to May 25, 1991, the first week Billboard began tabulating charts with electronically monitored piece count information from SoundScan, now Luminate. Pure album sales were the sole measurement utilized by the Billboard 200 albums chart through the list dated Dec. 6, 2014, after which that chart switched to a methodology that blends album sales with track equivalent album units and streaming equivalent album units. For all chart news, follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both Twitter and Instagram.

Songs You Know by Heart sold 15,000 copies in the U.S. in the week ending Sept. 7 (up from about 200 copies in the previous week), following Buffett’s death on Sept. 1. It’s the best sales week for the album in 24 years, since the chart date of July 3, 1999, when it sold 17,000 copies.

Travis Scott’s chart-topping Utopia holds at No. 2 on Top Album Sales with 12,000 sold (down 58%), while NewJeans’ former leader 2nd EP ‘Get Up’ is a non-mover at No. 4 with 11,000 (down 19%) and Taylor Swift’s former No. 1 Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) rises 6-5 with 10,000 (down 23%). NCT Dream’s ISTJ: The 3rd Album climbs one spot to No. 6 (8,000; down 37%) while Swift’s chart-topping Midnights bumps 9-7 (nearly 8,000; down 24%).

YouTuber and Twitch streamer Dream starts at No. 8 with his first album release, To Whoever Wants to Hear, with nearly 7,000 copies sold. J-Hope’s Jack in the Box slips 8-9 (6,000; down 49%) and Stray Kids’ 5-Star: The 3rd Album rises 15-10 (6,000; down 17%).

In the week ending Sept. 7, there were 1.630 million albums sold in the U.S. (down 2.2% compared to the previous week). Of that sum, physical albums (CDs, vinyl LPs, cassettes, etc.) comprised 1.287 million (down 3.4%) and digital albums comprised 342,000 (up 2.6%).

There were 543,000 CD albums sold in the week ending Sept. 7 (down 1.5% week-over-week) and 734,000 vinyl albums sold (down 5.1%). Year-to-date CD album sales stand at 23.826 million (up 1.5% compared to the same time frame a year ago) and year-to-date vinyl album sales total 31.881 million (up 20.1%).

Overall year-to-date album sales total 68.831 million (up 6.7% compared to the same year-to-date time frame a year ago). Year-to-date physical album sales stand at 56.075 million (up 11.3%) and digital album sales total 12.756 million (down 9.9%).