My Dear Melancholy’s streaming sum is even more impressive, considering it was achieved with only six songs. My Dear Melancholy’s streaming start of 94,000 SEA units is the third-biggest streaming week for an album in 2018, following the debut frames of Migos’ Culture II (150,000 SEA units) and XXXTentacion’s ? (106,000 SEA units). The title bows with 94,000 SEA units, which equates to 140.8 million on-demand audio streams of the set’s songs (each SEA unit is equal to 1,500 streams). Though My Dear Melancholy’s sales were solid, the album’s debut saw more than half of its units driven by streams. The Weeknd Is Reportedly Fighting for 'Starboy' Trademark
1) will be posted in full on Billboard's websites on Tuesday, April 10. The new April 14-dated chart (where The Weeknd debuts at No. based on multi-metric consumption, which includes traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA).
The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. 1s: 2016’s Starboy and 2015’s Beauty Behind the Madness. My Dear Melancholy follows The Weeknd’s two previous No. The six-song album appeared with little warning, following a cryptic Instagram post on March 27, which led to a confirmation of an album two days later. Of that sum, 68,000 were in traditional album sales. The surprise release, which arrived on March 30 via XO/Republic Records, earned 169,000 equivalent album units in the week ending April 5, according to Nielsen Music - the biggest week for an R&B album in over a year, since his own last album. 1 in a row on the Billboard 200 albums chart, as his latest project, My Dear Melancholy, debuts atop the list. This followed several months of in-studio pictures shared on the platform.The Weeknd logs his third No. Later that month, The Weeknd suggested that he was in the finishing stages of completing a new project, sharing multiple silent videos on Instagram of a recording studio, with the caption "mastering". On March 3, 2018, American rapper Travis Scott teased a new album by The Weeknd on Twitter, referring to it as "scary", and comparing it to when he "first heard" his music. Tesfaye received early support from Drake and scored his first Top Ten R&B/hip-hop placement as the featured artist on the fellow Torontonian's "Crew Love," but he swiftly outgrew his status as a Drake affiliate with his own hits and a streak of appearances on high-profile tracks by Wiz Khalifa, Future, Beyoncé, and Lana Del Rey Within a few years, however, Tesfaye had scored Top Ten hits with an Ariana Grande duet ("Love Me Harder"), the lead single from a major motion picture ("Earned It"), and a retro-contemporary disco-funk single ("I Can't Feel My Face"), the last of which was nominated for a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award despite its subject (cocaine).
The singer and songwriter made his early-2010s breakthrough with morose ballads that seemed to have no designs on mainstream appeal. The Weeknd is the alias of alternative R&B enigma-turned-pop star Abel Tesfaye, whose aching accounts of emotionally and physically toxic indulgences have translated to multi-platinum sales and Grammy recognition.