Ariana Grande And Justin Bieber Score The Best Sales Week For A Single Since Taylor Swift A Year Ago
by Hugh McIntyre
Throughout the past tracking week, Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber competed against rapper 6ix9ine to see who could start their new single higher on the Hot 100. In the end, the two pop stars claimed the No. 1 spot on the all-genre list of the most-consumed tracks in the U.S. with their first collaboration “Stuck With U,” while the hip-hop talent launched his comeback cut “GOOBA” in third place.
“Stuck With U” debuts at No. 1 with a sizable stream count and tens of millions of spins on radio stations across the country, but what really helped it rise as high as a tune can is its sales count. The track starts with 108,000 copies sold in just the first seven days it was available. That’s a huge figure in a time when sales of individual tracks have cratered and streaming is king, and it just goes to show how popular the two musicians behind the cut still are.
That 108,000 number makes “Stuck With U” the song with the largest one-week sales sum of 2020, as it easily outpaces BTS’s “On,” which launched with 86,000 copies purchased back in March.
In fact, “Stuck With U” now claims the biggest sales week for a song in the U.S. since this time last year. Last May, Taylor Swift dropped her new single “Me!,” which served as the first single from her then-upcoming album Lover. The tune, which also featured Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie, outsold every other track in the country many times over in its first frame, as 193,000 copies were purchased upon its arrival. Normally that would be enough to secure a tune the top spot on the Hot 100, but Swift and Urie were forced to settle for second place behind the unstoppable “Old Town Road.”
The 193,000 copies “Me!” sold marked the largest sales week since the same singer’s “Look What You Made Me Do” opened with over 350,000 copies in 2017.
At the moment, it looks like Grande and Bieber’s “Stuck With U” may hold on to the title of the largest one-week sales count of the year, as there are very few musicians left who can rack up a six-digit sales count, and at the moment none of them have announced any upcoming singles.