Small hop for Bad Bunny, big leap for foreign-language albums.
Bad Bunny’s album YHLQMDLG debuted on the March 14-dated Billboard 200 at No. 2 with nearly 179,000 album consumption units for the week ending March 5, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data, making it the highest-placing Spanish-language album in the chart’s history.
The album’s unprecedented success shows the U.S. market’s growing appetite for Latin music, and also boosts Sony Music Entertainment’s industry-leading Latin music distribution market share to nearly half of the overall pie — to 49.13% year to date, up from the previous week’s 47.59% year-to-date total. Within that, The Orchard, which retail sources say distributes Bad Bunny’s music, also saw its market share jump — to 23.75% year to date from 20.99% in the prior week.
If Bunny’s dominance is a sign of what’s to come, The Orchard is poised for more wins: It owns the premium Latin music indie label, Fania Records, and has a distribution deal with emerging Puerto Rican rapper Anuel AA.
Bunny’s album arrives after another major non-English-language album success: BTS, the Korean-speaking K-pop band, hit No. 1 with Map of the Soul: 7, which topped the Billboard 200 with 422,000 album consumption units for the week ending Feb. 27. Of that total, 347,000 came from album sales.
In the same week that Bunny came in No. 2, BTS occupied the No. 3 spot with 84,000 album consumption units. Since BTS is also distributed by The Orchard, according to retailers, that means the distributor’s overall market share for all genres is 6.33%, if the market share parked under the Columbia label, including the latter label’s acts distributed by The Orchard and some former RED distributed labels, is added into The Orchard’s share. That’s up from 6.11% year to date for the prior week ending Feb. 27.
This article originally appeared in the March 14, 2020 issue of Billboard.
