Pop star Sabrina Carpenter jokes about debuting atop the Billboard 200

NEW YORK – Pop star Sabrina Carpenter is celebrating after she triumphed over veteran rapper Travis Scott to clinch the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album chart. It was an extraordinarily close contest that left the music industry biting its collective nails with anticipation over the Labour Day weekend in America.

Carpenter’s Short N’ Sweet, her sixth studio album, featuring infectious tracks such as Espresso, Please Please Please and Taste that have dominated streaming and radio playlists in 2024, opens at the top with the equivalent of 362,000 sales in the United States, according to tracking service Luminate. That is the third-best opening week of the year, behind only Taylor Swift and Beyonce. It is Carpenter’s first time at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.

The Pennsylvania-born 25-year-old, who stands at 1.52m, joked about the achievement on X. She retweeted the news of her No. 1 spot and wrote: “Big week for the vertically challenged.”

Carpenter, who released Short N’ Sweet on Aug 23, came close to losing her big moment to a 10-year-old mixtape by Scott, Days Before Rodeo (2014), which was re-released on the same day. His album was credited with 361,000 sales – meaning the race came down to a margin of only about 1,000 copies. (Luminate’s publicly announced numbers are rounded.)

Carpenter, who began her career as a Disney Channel actress, has been releasing music for a decade. But she became a major pop contender only in the last couple of years, with a string of bubbly and smart singles, like Feather (2023), that have been pop-culture hits.

She performed as an opening act for a number of dates on Swift’s The Eras Tour in 2023 and 2024, including the six nights Swift played at Singapore’s National Stadium in March 2024.

Carpenter was widely expected to open on the chart with a big splash – until the re-release announcement a few days earlier by Scott, who is a master direct-to-consumer marketeer.

Short N’ Sweet garnered 233 million streams in the US. According to the formula that Billboard uses to reconcile streams with album sales, that means that clicks on streaming services gave her the equivalent of 176,000 album sales, nearly half of her total for the week. She also sold 184,000 copies of the album as a complete package.

Scott’s Days Before Rodeo, revisited almost exactly 10 years from its initial release, had never been released commercially before nor had it been widely available on all streaming services, according to Billboard. Yet, streaming contributed about 41 million clicks, equivalent to about 30,000 album sales.

Far more important were the 331,000 copies that Scott sold as a complete package, mostly from downloads. Those included an array of downloadable versions sold only through his website that had bonus tracks. Days Before Rodeo was also available in various boxed sets from Scott’s website, with items like T-shirts and hoodies. NYTIMES