You’ll find out, most likely tomorrow, how the rest of the chart fared when the next installment of Metal by Numbers is released. In short, pretty damn good for metal. Five Finger Death Punch sold more physical copes of Got Your Six than any other album, which would have given them a #1 album if it wasn’t for the way the chart works (streaming and track equivalent albums factor in, making The Weeknd #1 for a second week). But what’s perhaps even more impressive is Iron Maiden. The band’s double album, The Book of Souls, debuted at #4, selling 74,000 copies.
Iron Maiden have several reasons to rejoice about their chart position, which ties the chart debut of 2010’s The Final Frontier. First of all, the 74,000 copies they sold is the most the band have sold in a week since 1991, when the SoundScan chart debuted. And what’s even more killer is that all of their albums since X Factor have sold more than the last. From Billboard:
Their steady climb started with 1998’s Virtual XI(10,000 sales debut, up from the 6,000 of 1995’s X Factor) and then continued on with 2000’s Brave New World (38,000), 2003’s Dance of Death (40,000), 2006’s A Matter of Life and Death (56,000), 2010’s The Final Frontier (63,000) and now its new album.
Granted, 1995 was probably when Iron Maiden was at their least popular. Guitarist Adrian Smith and more importantly, singer Bruce Dickinson, weren’t in the band then, and you can see how many more albums Maiden sold when Bruce returned for Brave New World. But given that Bruce’s 2000 return started right around the time that CD sales were at their peak, the fact that they’ve continue to sell more with each release as CD sales have continued to decrease is stellar for any band. It would be interesting to see how Maiden albums sold when the band was at their mid-’80s peak before SoundScan debuted, but regardless, congratulations are in order for Maiden, and you’ll get to congratulate them early next year when their tour begins in the United States.
[via Billboard]
