It was a big week for music and a lot of it came as a surprise. Mac Miller's estate shared his first posthumous album, Circles, after announcing its imminent arrival just a week before. Eminem shocked us by dropping his own album, Music To Be Murdered By, with literally zero heads-up. While Dreamville has been teasing the deluxe expansion of Revenge of the Dreamers III for some time, it was only revealed a few days ago that it would be coming on Friday. With people flocking to these exciting releases and trying to divide their time between all of them, one might wonder what the Billboard charts will look like next week.
The sales projections are in courtesy of HitsDailyDouble, and it appears Eminem is going to come out on top. With estimated sales of 300,000-325,000, he is on track to secure his tenth consecutive No. 1 album. Pure sales make up about 110,000-125,000 of that, as CDs, vinyls and cassettes are all available to order through his webstore. According to HipHopNMore, Em’s last album Kamikaze - which was also a surprise drop - opened slightly better than Music To Be Murdered Bymu with 434,000 sales.
As nice as it would be to see Mac snag the No. 2 spot on the Billboard 200, Circles is up against another major release: Halsey's Manic. While Circles is projected to move 175,000-200,000 units, Manic is hovering in the 185,000-210,000 range. There's still a whole week of fan activity that can alter these numbers. We saw hip hop dominate last week with the streaming battle between Roddy Ricch's "The Box" and Justin Bieber's "Yummy", so perhaps Circles will perform a similar feat. It has sold 50,000-75,000 in pure sales so far and physicals can still be purchased on Mac's webstore.