Sabrina Carpenter earns her first No. 1 single with “Please Please Please”: NPR

Sabrina Carpenter’s rise is over: This week, she scored her first No. 1 hit.

Nina Westervelt/Billboard via Getty Images/Billboard

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Nina Westervelt/Billboard via Getty Images/Billboard

Sabrina Carpenter’s rise is over. Last week, she became the first artist since, uh, The Beatles have two songs that will debut in the top three places on the chart Billboard Hottest 100 Songs Chart. This week, the former Disney star scored her first No. 1 hit. Great feat, which leads me to wonder: what will she have up her sleeve for next week?

BEST SONGS:

A week after debuting at No. 2, Sabrina Carpenter’s sweet pop confection “Please Please Please” rose to No. 1 on the chart. Billboard Hottest 100 Songs chart – and it’s the first time Carpenter has reached No. 1 on the song chart. (This song, by the way, is in no way to be confused with the Smiths’ melancholic and classic 1984 B-side, “Please, Please, Please Let Me get what I want.”)

Carpenter now has two singles in the top five: Her song “Espresso,” which was No. 3 last week (and put her in the company of the Beatles), slipped to No. 4. Meanwhile, after five weeks in first place, Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help,” featuring Morgan Wallen, fell to second place. The rest of the top five spots are currently occupied by Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” at No. 3 and Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” at No. 5.

BEST ALBUMS:

For a ninth consecutive week, Taylor Swift The Department of Tortured Poets remains at No. 1 in the ranking Billboard Chart of 200 albums – which, like Billboard ratings, marks Swift’s 78th career week at No. 1 and continues her run as a solo artist with the most weeks at the top album spot since the Billboard 200 was first published in 1956.

As my esteemed colleague Stephen Thompson pointed out in this space last week, even Taylor Swift still has a little way to go before she surpasses the Beatles’ all-time record of 132 total weeks at No. 1. Swift, the female artist to have the longest consecutive number 1 album after debuting at the top of the chart since Whitney Houston’s album, Whitneywas released in 1987. (It spent 11 weeks at #1.)

At No. 2 this week is Billie Eilish Hit me hard and softan album that Billboard perhaps less than charitably, but nonetheless accurately describes this week as a “non-move,” given that it only earned 84,000 equivalent album units that week.

That description may make Eilish’s team wince, but she’s not the only artist seeing weak numbers right now. Swift gained only 126,000 units this week, compared to 2.61 million in Tortured poets‘ first week. Apparently, even hardcore Swifties might finally be nearing their saturation point.

It appears a summer slump may have begun for the recorded music industry: rapper and singer Don Toliver’s Hard Stone Psycho debuts at No. 3 (with just 76,500 equivalent album units this week); Morgan Wallen One thing at a time remains at No. 4 (73,000 units). New Orleans hip-hop duo $uicideboy$ landed their highest number of charts to date with New World Depression at No. 5 – which only brought in 66,000 units.

TO NOTE:

In the vinyl album chart, $uicideboy$ took first place, with 16,000 albums sold in six different variations. (A brief history lesson: Selling colored vinyl – and before that, colored shellac – has been a marketing strategy in the label business since almost the dawn of recorded music. As early as the 1910s, labels like Vocalion released brightly colored 78s to attract consumers.)

But it’s not just New Orleans rap, or Taylor Swift, that is currently attracting fans’ attention: the No. 2 and No. 4 spots on the vinyl albums chart are currently occupied by the soundtracks of movies. Dusk And The Twilight Saga: New Moonreleased in 2008 and 2009 respectively. Long live vampire nostalgia, I guess.