Karol G Surpasses Bad Bunny and Selena Quintanilla in a Historic Record
Karol G is going like a projectile straight to break all glass ceilings. The Colombian singer has broken a new record, becoming the first woman in history to score a #1 album in the U.S. with an album entirely in Spanish.
“Mañana Será Bonito,” Karol G’s latest album, debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 with nearly one hundred thousand units sold, Luminate indicated.
And all this thanks to streaming activity.
In this way, the Colombian singer joins Bad Bunny in a powerful streak for Latin artists breaking records further up the Caribbean.
Selena walked so Karol G could run
With her latest achievement, Karol G joins Tex-Mex icon Selena as the only female artist in history to have a Spanish-language album reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
In 1995, Selena conquered the Billboard 200 chart with her posthumous album “Dreaming of You.” However, this album featured six tracks in Spanish, five in English, and two duets combining both.
The Billboard chart is one of the industry’s most important rankings. The Billboard 200 list identifies the week’s most popular albums in the United States based on multi-metric consumption measured in album-equivalent units.
As explained by Billboard, units comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA), and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). Each unit is equal to the sale of an album, 10 individual tracks from an album, 3,750 official ad-supported audio and video-on-demand streams, or 1,250 paid/subscriptions generated by tracks from an album.
In the case of “Mañana Será Bonito,” of the album’s 94,000 equivalent units, 83,000 were SEA units (which equates to 118.73 million official on-demand streams of the album’s 17 songs), 10,000 were album sales, and 1,000 were TEA units.
Sales of the album were driven mainly by its digital download album (8,500), although there was a CD available in limited quantities, of which about 1,500 copies were sold. Karol G’s official web store also offered the digital album in two alternative cover variants.
“Mañana logs the largest week, by equivalent album units earned, for a Latin album by a woman since the chart began measuring by units in December of 2014,” Keith Caulfield writes for Billboard. “Further, as Mañana generated 118.73 million official on-demand streams for its songs, the set registers the biggest streaming week ever for a Latin album by a woman.”
