Lady Gaga’s ‘Harlequin’ Debuts at No. 1 on Jazz Charts, Top 5 on Album Sales

Lady Gaga scores her third No. 1 on Billboard’s Jazz Albums and Traditional Jazz Albums charts, as Harlequin debuts atop both tallies (dated Oct. 12). The companion set to her film Joker: Folie à Deux, earned 25,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in the week ending Oct. 3, according to Luminate. Of that sum, 16,000 are traditional album sales.

Gaga previously topped both rankings with her collaborative albums with Tony Bennett: Love for Sale (in 2021) and Cheek to Cheek (2014).

Harlequin earns the biggest debut week, by units earned, for any jazz album, or traditional jazz album, since Love for Sale earned 41,000 units in its opening week (Oct. 16, 2021-dated charts).  

Equivalent album units comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). Each unit equals one album sale, or 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams generated by songs from an album. All Oct. 12, 2024-dated charts will be posted in full on Billboard‘s website on Tuesday, Oct. 8. For all chart news, follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both X, formerly known as Twitter, and Instagram.

Of Harlequin’s first-week units, streaming equivalent album-units comprise nearly 9,000 – equaling 11.34 million official on-demand streams of the album’s songs. The latter figure marks the biggest debut streaming week for a jazz album in over a year, since Laufey’s Bewitched bowed with 22.36 million clicks (Sept. 23, 2023-dated chart).

Harlequin also debuts at No. 20 on the overall Billboard 200 and No. 3 on both Vinyl Albums and Top Album Sales.

Jazz Albums and Traditional Jazz Albums rank the week’s most popular jazz and traditional jazz albums, respectively, by equivalent album units earned. The Billboard 200 ranks the week’s most popular albums across all genres, by units. Vinyl Albums and Top Album Sales tally the week’s top-selling vinyl albums, and overall albums, by traditional album sales.

Also on Top Album Sales, Billy Strings’ Highway Prayer debuts at No. 1 with 19,000 sold in its first week – the act’s biggest sales week ever. It’s also the first No. 1 for the artist. Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess slips one spot to No. 2 (18,000; down 67%), Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet is steady at No. 4 (14,000; down 3%), Katy Perry’s 143 falls 2-5 (9,000; down 77%), Luke Bryan’s Mind of a Country Boy bows at No. 6 (nearly 8,000), Taylor Swift’s chart-topping Folklore vaults 33-7 (7,500; up 153% after a stock replenishment of its CD at retail), Stray Kids’ former leader ATE is a non-mover at No. 8 (7,000; down 6%), P1Harmony’s Sad Song falls 3-9 (6,000; down 77%) and Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft climbs 15-10 (nearly 6,000; up 8%).

Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart ranks the top-selling albums of the week based only on traditional album sales. The chart’s history dates back to May 25, 1991, the first week Billboard began tabulating charts with electronically monitored piece count information from SoundScan, now Luminate. Pure album sales were the sole measurement utilized by the Billboard 200 albums chart through the list dated Dec. 6, 2014, after which that chart switched to a methodology that blends album sales with track equivalent album units and streaming equivalent album units.

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