How Did Sabrina Carpenter Manage Such an Impressive First Week for ‘Short n’ Sweet’?

It’s been a massive year for new releases from huge artists — and with the first-week returns for her Short n’ Sweet album, Sabrina Carpenter has now proven herself as big as nearly any of ’em.

The new LP — officially Carpenter’s sixth, but just her second since leaving the Disney-owned Hollywood Records for Island — launches atop the Billboard 200 (dated Sept. 17) this week with 362,000 first-week units, making it the year’s third-biggest bow (after Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter). Meanwhile, the album launches all 10 of its brand new tracks onto the top half of the Hot 100 — where pre-release singles “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” have long lived — led by the No. 2 entrance of new single “Taste.”

How did Sabrina Carpenter work her way up to these A-list numbers? And what do we think of Short n’ Sweet beyond the big hits? Billboard staffers answer these questions and more below.

1. Sabrina Carpenter scores her best week (and then some) with 362,000 first-week units for Short n’ Sweet – the third-best first-week mark of the year for any artist — while also charting all 12 tracks within the Hot 100’s top 50. On a scale from 1-10, how big a triumph are those first-week stats for Carpenter?

Hannah Dailey: That’s an absolute 10, especially considering that before this era, she hadn’t even broken into the top 20 of either chart. She’s worked for so long for this moment and played all her cards exactly right this year to build hype leading up to the Short n’ Sweet era. It’s an incredible feat, and she and her team should be very proud. 

Stephen Daw: 10, easily. Had this just been her first No. 1 album, this moment would have already been a pretty big deal for Sabrina — to have Short n’ Sweet rake in such massive numbers and debut all of its songs within the chart’s top 50 makes it a monumental success for her.

Kristin Robinson: 10! I don’t think any artist could ask for a better roll out than this one. Every new single/focus track has been as big if not bigger than the one before it. The music videos captured the cultural zeitgeist, and she has become an artist that pretty much everyone has been rooting for. Any artist, whether they’ve been famous for 10 years or one year, would be lucky to have so much success. I think her good fortune will continue as well. If you check TikTok, it seems that fans are not just connecting to the top songs — they are obsessing over the deeper cuts too. That is always a great sign that the full album has legs.

Andrew Unterberger: It is indeed a 10. If you told me a year ago (hell, if you told me six months ago) that Sabrina had posted a 36,200-unit week in her new album’s first frame — literally one-tenth of what she ended up doing with Short n’ Sweet — I would’ve said that was a great showing for her. To outpace some of the artists who have been the very pace-setters for some of the music Carpenter is making in this album is just jaw-dropping, and an unqualified win for all involved.

Christine Werthman: I’m withholding the 10 for if she’d bested everyone this year, but I’ll still go big with a 9. The numbers alone are impressive, but the biggest triumph to me is that this is her sixth studio album, and she’s finally breaking through in a massive way. It is far from the norm nowadays for most artists to toil away and eventually reach this level of success, especially in pop. Props to her and similarly long-building labelmate Chappell Roan for sticking with it.  

2. In a year full of major releases from major pop stars – Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Post Malone, Ye, many others – Carpenter’s 2024 first-week number passes everyone outside of pop’s arguable two contemporary leading lights, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. What is the biggest reason you think SnS was able to outperform so many huge releases, at just 12 tracks with no features?

Hannah Dailey: She worked meticulously to make sure that people would have every reason to tune in once Short n’ Sweet dropped, from capitalizing on her clicky romance with Barry Keoghan to keeping her branding focused and consistent with what’s been working for her this past year. She also chose three excellent singles to lead the album — “Espresso,” “Please Please Please” and “Taste” — and paired them with music videos that allowed her personality and charisma to shine through. All of this made for a really fresh, polished rollout that followed a more traditional pop star format that people seemed to really resonate with.

Stephen Daw: It ultimately boils down to the joint success stories of “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” I think. Timing is tricky in the modern music business, especially with how capricious viral success can be on the charts. But the stars really aligned for Sabrina — after years building up her reputation as pop music’s next main character, she managed to score her first two top five hits on the Hot 100 within a month of one another. Once she had that momentum going, there was almost no way to stop her from storming the charts like this. 

Kristin Robinson: I think first and foremost, the songs are well-crafted, upbeat and infectious. This should come as no surprise, given the number of hitmakers that helped her put it together. Then secondly, you can tell Sabrina put in the work to get here. These kinds of successes are never an accident: It requires extreme effort and dedication on the artist’s part to constantly try to stay in front of their audiences. I don’t think we got nearly as many interviews, music videos, live shows, festival sets, promotional bits, etc. from Billie, Ariana, Post and Ye.

Andrew Unterberger: Sabrina has just nailed all of the small things over the course of the past six months — everything from the music videos to the release schedule to the live performances to specific lyrical details — in a way that built momentum organically but purposefully leading up to Short n’ Sweet. And perhaps most importantly, in the weeks leading up to the album, she pulled back a little: It never felt like the album had come out before the album actually came out, which is a trap a lot of her peers can’t help themselves from falling into. (Well, her one-time peers anyway, her current peer list is rapidly dwindling.)

Christine Werthman: Perhaps the answer is in the title: Short n’ Sweet. Although, to play my own contrarian, just because an album is short doesn’t mean it’ll be an easy listen. The key is that Carpenter gives the people what they want — quippy one-liners, bedroom eyes, vocal trills — and while she might vary the packaging (“Coincidence,” “Bed Chem,” “Slim Pickins”) those elements are always present. After six albums, Carpenter has homed in on her strengths, and these songs play to them over 36 delightful minutes.

3. “Taste” leads the way among the set’s newly debuting tracks on this week’s Hot 100, debuting at No. 2 and sandwiching itself in between the peaks of her two established smashes, “Espresso” (No. 3) and “Please Please Please” (No. 1). Will it ultimately be as big as those two long-lasting hits, or do you think it will fade quicker after its bow? 

Hannah Dailey: I definitely think “Taste” will be a lasting hit alongside “Espresso” and “Please Please Please.” It’s catchy and fun, the music video is killer, and it already has a bunch of traction on TikTok. Like it or not, the Sabrina chart domination is definitely going to continue in the near future.

Stephen Daw: I think “Taste” is going to linger. The twangy, country-adjacent sound is perfectly in line with what audiences have been playing on repeat lately, it’s got a viral music video that fans are still obsessing over and it carries that same earworm songwriting that made both “Espresso” and “Please” burrow into the pop culture lexicon. I don’t think it’s going to be bigger than either of her previously established hits, but I can see “Taste” enjoying a long shelf life in the upper echelons of the Hot 100. 

Kristin Robinson: Well, I’ve been wrong before. I thought there was no way “Please Please Please” would get as big as “Espresso” and I was wrong. I wouldn’t be shocked if this did the best of the three because the momentum is so strong right now.

Andrew Unterberger: It’s already a smash, and is gonna be around for a while. It’s the perfect third single to follow a pair of pre-release smashes: feeling simultaneously of a piece and totally separate from the first two, and already familiar-sounding from the first listen. And it’s very good, which usually helps.

Christine Werthman: “Taste” was already one of my favorite songs on the album, even before I watched the wonderfully unhinged video co-starring Jenna Ortega. The strength of the song on its own, coupled with the visual, will keep it around, as will the approaching Halloween season. Best spooky videos list, anyone? 

4. While Carpenter has certainly established herself as a brilliant singles artist, does the rest of Short n’ Sweet live up to its hits to you? Is there anything you’d like to hear her do more or less of in the future?

Hannah Dailey: The other songs on Short n’ Sweet feel very compatible with the album’s singles: flirty, fun and sassy. I do think she needs to move on from the hypersexualized-short-girl schtick after this album, though, or else I worry she’ll put herself in a box that people might grow wary of down the line. 

Stephen Daw: Part of what makes Short n’ Sweet work as well as it does is the feeling throughout that Sabrina is having the best time making big pop songs fun again. Nothing feels too self-serious, even in the album’s down-tempo ballads. The only problem that comes with her focus on clever, cheeky songwriting is that the sound of some of her songs can fall to the wayside, making some of this album’s songs feel generic by comparison to her megahits. If Sabrina can keep her songwriting this sharp while putting an even bigger focus on honing what “her sound” is, then her career will be far from short and that much sweeter. 

Kristin Robinson: I think there are strong songs on this album that are not singles — my favorite being “Sharpest Tool” – but it does trail off a little bit in quality towards the end. In the future, I would like to see her embracing her own style more. A number of these songs sound like ones that would’ve been pitched to Ariana Grande five years ago. “Slim Pickins” feels too Kacey Musgraves. While the songs are all well-written, this album can feel a bit derivative.

Andrew Unterberger: The first half of this album in particular is simply all killer — both in terms of every song hitting, and the ordering of them being perfectly paced. If it maybe tails off a tiny bit post-“Espresso…” well, gotta leave some room for improvement for her second album as a certified superstar.

Christine Werthman: Carpenter made a great pop album with high replay value. This isn’t one of those where you have to hold your breath and wait for the known hits because there are plenty more to discover — “Taste, “Good Graces,” “Juno” — even if they don’t all become chart-toppers. Though some of the slower songs might have you reaching for the skip button, she’ll jolt you awake with lyrics like, “jack off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen” on “Dumb & Poetic.” The woman is a wordsmith! If anything, I’d love to hear more 1990s rhythmic stuff from her like “Good Graces,” another new standout.

5. Carpenter’s superstar resume is filling up more rapidly than even her biggest boosters could’ve predicted at the beginning of the year. What’s one thing she’s yet to check off there that you think would help further cement 2024 as Her Year? 

Hannah Dailey: She’s already won over a larger audience, as well as proved her prowess commercially and on the charts. All that’s left for her to do, in my opinion, is show that she’s earned the respect of her peers and critics in the music industry by securing a Grammy nomination this November. Once she has Recording Academy recognition, her status as a Main Pop Girl will absolutely be cemented. 

Stephen Daw: If Sabrina can get one major city to temporarily rename itself in her honor during her upcoming tour, I feel like the Main Pop Girl checklist will be pretty much complete.

Kristin Robinson: The obvious answer is some Grammy wins in February. I also think having one more hit after “Taste” though would put this album over the top as one akin to Future Nostalgia by Dua Lipa or SOS by SZA – both albums that just had hit after hit.

Andrew Unterberger: Before we start worrying about Carpenter filling her awards mantle, how about getting a super-dope award show performance from her first? She’ll have her chance next week at the MTV Video Music Awards, a stage that the true pop greats of the last 40 years have always embraced the opportunity to make their mark on. I hope she brings it, and I have little doubt that she will.

Christine Werthman: How about a big-name collab? But instead of going for a pop OG, Carpenter should link with fellow 2024 queen Chappell Roan. Since Carpenter and Roan are already friends, labelmates and cheeky pop connoisseurs, I think a collab between those two would create a huge moment to close out the year.

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