Coldplay earns their first leader on the Billboard 200 in over a decade with their eco-friendly “Moon Music” LP. The set enters with 120,000 equivalent album units earned, of which 106,000 are in traditional album sales, according to data from Luminate.
“Moon Music,” Coldplay’s 10th studio effort, marks the band’s highest opening week in the U.S. since 2015’s “A Head Full Of Dreams,” and is their first Billboard 200 No. 1 since 2014’s “Ghost Stories.” The 10-song set also claims the biggest opening week for a UK act of 2024 so far, outselling the rest of the UK’s Top 40 album chart combined, and marking the highest-performing effort by a group since One Direction in 2013.
“To achieve this success in the middle of a record-breaking stadium tour makes it all the more impressive,” says Phil Harvey, Coldplay’s manager, in a statement shared with Variety. “As well as my fantastic co-managers Mandi Frost and Arlene Moon and the band’s incredible team, I’d like to offer sincere thanks to Max Lousada, Julie Greenwald and her team at Atlantic, everyone at Parlophone, as well as our touring family at Live Nation, WME and SJM. We’re looking forward to a long album campaign – not least in the U.S., where the band will return next year for their third summer of sold-out stadium shows and where we much look forward to working with Elliot Grainge and his new team.”
“Moon Music’s” 106,000 album sales are monumental in Coldplay’s consistent efforts to create and sell sustainable physical product. The albums were released as 140g EcoRecord rPET LPs, with each copy made from nine recycled PET-plastic bottles recovered from post-consumer waste. Additionally, the band collaborated with The Ocean Cleanup to create the “Notebook Edition LP,” for which the rPET comprises 70% river plastic, intercepted by The Ocean Cleanup from the Rio Las Vacas, Guatemala. The standard CD editions of “Moon Music” were also the world’s first to be released on EcoCD, created from 90% recycled polycarbonate, sourced from post-consumer waste streams.
Coldplay claims the only newly-released LP in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 on the Oct. 19-dated list as Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet” moves to No. 2 with 93,000 equivalent album units (after four non consecutive weeks atop the list). Chappell Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” is at No. 3 with 56,000 units; Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” remains at its previous position of No. 4; and Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” is at No. 5.
Elsewhere, the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 songs chart remains largely unchanged as Shaboozey‘s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” nabs a 14th week at No. 1 as the longest-running hit of the year. The song has sold a combined total of 407,000 units as of Oct. 10, per Luminate. With streaming numbers taken into account, “A Bar Song” leads with a total of 5.9 million units, followed by Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help” with 5.3 million units, and Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” at 5.2 million.
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