Miley waited 13 years for another No. 1 album, and she got it: Bass Persuades debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 dated Oct. 3, her first chart-topper since Bangerz in 2013. One week later, Billboard's chart had the same album at No. 157, a fall of 156 places. The short version is that fans bought the album far more than they played it.
According to Variety, the fall is a record, specifically "the most precipitous fall from an album that premiered at No. 1 in its debut week to a considerably less lofty place in week 2." It is not the biggest fall from No. 1 ever: Bon Jovi in 2018 and Travis Scott in 2024 fell further, but both albums were years old when they had their brief runs at the top. For a brand-new album in its second week, by Variety's count, Miley's drop is the steepest on record.
So what was the No. 1 made of? Bass Persuades opened with 61,000 equivalent album units, the chart's blend of purchases and streams, and Billboard's breakdown shows 47,000 of them were album sales. That is 77 percent. Billboard credits the sales to the album's availability across "16 vinyl variants (one with a bonus track), nine CD variants (one with a bonus track), six download variants (most with bonus tracks) and a cassette." I count 32 ways to buy one album.
Streaming tells a different story. The album drew 14.22 million on-demand streams in its first week. Her previous album, Something Beautiful, drew 22.18 million in its first week in June 2025, on sales of 27,000 across ten physical editions. (Billboard changed how many streams make a unit between the two releases, so the raw stream counts are the fair comparison.) Sales went up 74 percent; streams went down 36 percent. NPR's Stephen Thompson flagged the same thing the week of the debut, pointing to "a few asterisks worth noting": an "unusually slow week on the charts," and first-week streams "actually weaker than those of its predecessor."
Ella Langley's Dandelion held at No. 2 with "nearly 61,000" units, though Billboard gives no sales and streams split for it. The contrast is Riley Green, who debuted at No. 3 with 60,000, and his album drew 30.89 million streams, more than twice Miley's. On Billboard's rounded figures, Green missed the top spot by about 1,000 units, with half his total coming from streams.
A sale is counted once; a stream comes back every time someone presses play. An album that opens on purchases has very little underneath it once the purchases are done. Billboard doesn't publish units at No. 157, so the closest test I have is her last record, and it cuts both ways. Something Beautiful was also mostly sales, 27,000 of its 44,000 units, and Exclaim notes it fell from No. 4 to No. 102 in its second week and off the chart in its third, even with more streams behind it. So thinner streaming is part of the story, not all of it. Variety offers another factor: the trouble with the second-week hold "may be partly due to the lack of a hit single; the title track peaked on the Hot 100 at No. 35 prior to the full album’s release."
None of this breaks the rules. Billboard counts variant sales toward the chart, and the same chart article credits Green's sales to 16 editions (13 vinyl and CD variants, two downloads and a cassette) and beabadoobee's, at No. 7, to 10 vinyl variants, three CD variants, two cassettes and a download. In Billboard's own roundtable, Andrew Unterberger called the No. 1 "a tiny bit misleading," since its first week was little more than half the 119,000 units her 2023 album Endless Summer Vacation put up, and added, "Still a big first week, but not quite a game-changer."
Forty-seven thousand copies in a week is fans spending real money, and Thompson put it simply: "a chart-topping album is a chart-topping album." What Billboard's figures describe, though, is an album that sold to the people who already wanted to own it. A comeback needs the listeners beyond them, and the first week's streams counted fewer of those than last time.
