The set, which features music from and inspired by the blockbuster Marvel Studios film Black Panther, garners the biggest week for a soundtrack — in terms of total units earned — in a year-and-a-half. The last soundtrack to score a larger week was Suicide Squad: The Album, which bowed atop the Aug. 27, 2016-dated list with 182,000 units earned. Black Panther: The Album was released on Feb. 9 through Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope Records.
The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption, which includes traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). The new Feb. 24-dated chart (where Black Panther: The Album starts at No. 1) will be posted in full on Billboard’s websites on Wednesday (Feb. 21) — one day later than usual, due to the Presidents’ Day holiday in the U.S. on Feb. 19.
The Black Panther album includes a number of songs by Kendrick Lamar, who curated and produced the hip-hop-heavy album with Top Dawg Entertainment’s founder/CEO Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith. The set’s tunes also boast contributions from The Weeknd, SZA, Khalid and James Blake, among others. The album is the fifth No. 1 for Top Dawg, following a trio of leaders from Lamar (DAMN., untitled unmastered. and To Pimp a Butterfly) and ScHoolboy Q’s Oxymoron.
Black Panther is the second soundtrack to reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2018, following The Greatest Showman, which spent two weeks atop the list (dated Jan. 13 and 20).
The 14-track Black Panther album’s debut is powered mostly by streams, as the set collected 93,000 streaming equivalent album units. (The remainder of its bow came from traditional album sales: 52,000; and track equivalent album units: 9,000.) It’s not unusual to see such a large streaming number for Black Panther: The Album, as hip-hop albums tend to perform well on streaming services.
Black Panther: The Album’s 93,000 SEA unit launch equates to 138.9 million on-demand audio streams for the album’s songs in the week ending Feb. 15. That’s the largest streaming week ever for a soundtrack, surging past the 40.4 million on-demand audio streams The Greatest Showman collected in the week ending Jan. 25.