Nicki Minaj's Queen and Travis Scott's Astroworld have fairly even chances to top next week's Billboard 200, Billboard reports. Citing "industry forecasters," Billboard suggests that Nicki and Travis could each produce around 160,000 equivalent album units this cycle, making it too close to call at this point.
Nicki's Queen album will mostly benefit from high streaming activity, but she will also see sales through a concert bundle which included an album purchase with tickets to her upcoming Nicki Hndrxx tour with Future. Travis is seeing a high streaming week as well, and has offered album bundles along with the large swaths of merch he's been peddling this week. In his debut week on the charts, he moved 537,000 units.
Within the last 24 hours, Nicki added her collaboration with 6ix9ine, "FEFE," to Queen as the 20th track. The song's streams from this week will now contribute to the album's first-week sales. Seeing that it continues to be a highly streamed song (last week, it rose to No. 3 on the Hot 100), it could potentially give Nicki the boost over Travis. While previous streams of the song will not count towards Nicki's first-week sales on Billboard, they will contribute to those tabulated by the RIAA for gold and platinum certification
If Nicki does top the charts, she'll be the first female rap artist with three No. 1 albums. If the album moves somewhere around 160,000, it will be the lowest first week of sales in Nicki's career. The Pinkprint moved 198,000 units in 2014, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded moved 253,000 in 2012, and her debut, Pink Friday, moved 375,000 in 2010.
According to Billboard, Trippie Redd's debut album Life's A Trip is expected to earn somewhere around 65,000 units, likely putting him in the top five of the Billboard 200.
The official sales numbers will be announced by Billboard this Sunday, August 19th.