The Weeknd Takes Top Two Spots on Rolling Stone Singles Chart
By Variety Staff
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Fighting off a seasonal surge from Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” The Weeknd’s two new singles topped the Rolling Stone Top 100 songs chart this week. “Heartless” and “Blinding Lights,” both of which dropped last week, rocketed to No. 1 and 2 respectively with more than 40 million streams between them. Carey’s evergreen holiday single racked up 20 million streams to land at No. 3. A number of other seasonal tracks hit the Top 10, including Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock,” and Burl Ives’ “A Holly Jolly Christmas.”
In a slow week for album releases, the soundtrack to Disney’s “Frozen 2” topped the Rolling Stone Top 200 Albums chart. The album, which features songs written by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, showed a strong balance of sales (more than 32,000) and streams (more than 42 million). Taylor Swift’s “Lover” and Post Malone’s “Hollywood’s Bleeding” landed at No. 2 and 3 with more than 67,000 album-equivalent units and 66,400, respectively.
Only two new albums debuted in the Top 40 — Fabolous’ “Summertime Shootout 3: Coldest Summer Ever,” at No. 6 with 42.8 million streams, and another that is actually an expanded version of a 37-year-old album: the reissue of Prince’s “1999,” which reached No. 31 on the strength of more than 12,000 album sales after the release of a deluxe reissue — many of which were pricey, multi-disc deluxe boxed sets (with the CD package going for around $70 and the vinyl up to $200).
Finally, Post Malone returned to the top of the Rolling Stone Artists 500 chart, with breaking into the Top 5. Post Malone garnered 105.8 million song streams as his latest album, “Hollywood’s Bleeding,” landed at No. 3, while last week’s No. 1 artist, Trippie Redd, fell back to No. 2 with 95.4 million song streams.
Young Boy Never Broke Again and Drake held at No. 3 and 4, respectively.
The Rolling Stone Artists 500 chart ranks the most-streamed artists of the week in the United States, taking into account audio streams across an artist’s entire catalog during the tracking period. The chart does not include passive listening such as terrestrial radio or digital radio. The Artists 500 is updated daily, and each week Rolling Stone finalizes and publishes an official version of the chart, covering the seven-day period ending with the previous Thursday. For the full charts and more details, head over to rollingstone.com/charts .
