Miley, the pop veteran who recently dropped the "Cyrus" from her stage name, had the #1 album in America last week. This week, things look starkly different. Her new album Bass Persuades debuted at #1 last week.
Its 61,000 album equivalent units were enough to temporarily sneak past Ella Langley's Dandelion and give Miley her first #1 album since 2013's Bangerz. This week, Bass Persuades plummets all the way down to #157 — the biggest-ever drop from a #1 debut. As Variety reports, Miley's second-week drop-off puts her in rare company.
There have been a couple of albums that fell even further in a single week, but there were extenuating circumstances both times. Bon Jovi's This House Is Not For Sale reached #1 in 2018, two years after it came out, when the band bundled it with concert tickets, and then it fell to #169 in the next week. The 10th-anniversary of Travis Scott's Days Before Rodeo mixtape hit #1 in 2024, the week that the vinyl pre-orders finally shipped out, and then fell off the 200 chart entirely the next week.
But Bass Persuades is a new album that doesn't seem to be part of a merch drop or anything like that, so its fall feels a little different. These days, it's pretty common for a hyped-up album to debut at #1 before disappearing from the conversation, and Bass Persuades feels like a turbo-charged version of that story. It's a relatively experimental record from a big name; most stars of Miley's stature aren't out here collaborating with Model/Actriz.
It doesn't have a big hit single; the title track peaked at #35. Miley only announced its release a few weeks before it came out, and she hasn't unveiled plans for a tour or anything like that. Attention spans are short.
Curiosity streams are not sustainable. Maybe bass simply does not persuade. On this week's album chart, Miley's onetime contemporary Taylor Swift once again returns to #1, thanks to the Life Of A Showgirl re-release with four extra tracks. (Swift's song "Patient Zero" also debuts at #1 on the Hot 100 this week.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
