The Weeknd has done it yet again with another No. 1 project.
The Canadian artist has charted his fourth consecutive No. 1 album with Dawn FM. This follows 2015’s Beauty Behind The Madness, 2016’s Starboy, and 2020’s After Hours. This time he had to fight a bit more for the top position as he got a serious challenge from Gunna‘s DS4Ever.
Both albums kick off the 2022 era, and both are well received by fans. The latest stats on the album came courtesy of Hits Daily Double. According to the publication, The Weeknd’s fifth studio effort, Dawn FM, grabbed the No. 1 spot, on debut, with an estimated 154,000 total album-equivalent units earned.
Gunna’s finale to his Drip Season series took the No. 2 position behind Dawn FM with an estimated 151,000 total album-equivalent units earned. Gunna’s success came from well-thought-out features that pulled hip-hop fans in.
Some notable features included Drake on “P Power” and “Too Easy” with Future. There was also a remix of “Too Easy,” which featured Roddy Ricch. The album’s success can also be attributed to how much it trended on social media bringing in even more listeners.
The Weeknd’s numbers were previously predicted by Hits Daily Double and stood just at what they anticipated with an estimated 154,000 total album-equivalent earned units. What has to be taken into consideration is the fact that The Weeknd decided not to release physical copies of Dawn FM, something that would have probably increased the album sales.
That information was first made public in a now-deleted tweet that stated, “No physical copies (vinyls, CDs, cassettes) for @theweeknd’s ‘Dawn FM’ will be available in store during release week. Furthermore, no physical copies will be shipped the first week. This will obviously impact first week figures.”
The “Save Your Tears” crooner responded to that tweet by explaining that the numbers were of no interest to him.
“This doesn’t matter to me. What matters is getting to experience the album together with the fans during these times,” he said on January 6.
Even with such high expectations after the blistering popularity of After Hours, The Weeknd did not disappoint. Some in the industry have already begun to shower praise on the album.
That includes respected rapper and producer Timbaland, who compared the album to Michael Jackson’s classic Thriller. Even though those comments didn’t go down so well on Twitter, it’s an indicator of how highly the producer ranked the “Blinding Lights” artist’s latest efforts.
The Weeknd’s timing for dropping the album is also sublime since there are no real challengers coming in right now. If it remains like this, he’s looking set to hold on to the top spot on the Billboard 200 chart for a second straight week.
He’ll be hoping that it can match the ridiculously impressive success of After Hours which debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 with 444,000 album-equivalent units, which included 275,000 pure album sales. It marked the biggest first-week sales of 2020 for an album at the time. It eventually spent four weeks at No. 1 and became the first album to notch four consecutive weeks since Drake’s Scorpion in 2018.
That album has been certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for earning over two million album-equivalent units in the US.
