Morgan Wallen made headlines in 2020 for an unfortunate reason: He was set to be a musical guest on Saturday Night Live, but was ousted after videos of him at a maskless party surfaced. Wallen did end up making his SNL debut on the show a few weeks later, though, an appearance that included a sketch about that fateful party.
Here in 2021, though, Wallen is making news for better reasons: His latest album, Dangerous: The Double Album, has debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart dated January 23, and it did so thanks to a historic week of streaming.
Of the 265,000 equivalent album units Wallen’s album earned, 184,000 were streaming equivalent albums units, which is equal to 240.18 million on-demand streams of the album’s songs. That’s the biggest streaming week ever for a country album, as it more than doubled the previous record holder: Luke Combs’ What You See If What You Get racked up 102.26 million streams during the week ending October 29, 2020, the week that Combs reissued the album with bonus songs, bringing the total to 23 tracks.
The fact that Dangerous features 30 tracks likely helped this number grow so large, since the count is based on total streams across all the album’s songs. Billboard notes, though, that “even if the album were trimmed down to the 18 least-streamed tracks (in the week ending Jan. 14), their sum of 105.08 million would still beat Combs’ former record.”
