As always, a forecast can be wildly different from the final outcome. In general, one can best guess an album's debut sales week once it's actually on sale.
The band actually makes its Billboard chart debut this week, arriving at No. 25 on the Social 50 (dated April 5), thanks to the international release of the EP last week.
The Social 50 ranks the most popular artists on YouTube, Vevo, Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, Wikipedia, Myspace and Instagram. The chart's methodology blends weekly additions of friends/fans/followers along with artist page views, song plays and reactions as measured by music analytics company Next Big Sound.
The buzz around the EP debut equates to a 68% rise in weekly conversation across Facebook and Twitter about the band, which helped lead to the addition of more than 128,000 fans on Facebook (up 62%) and 59,000 on Twitter (up 55%).
On Instagram alone, the band received a 78% increase in activity as the platform was utilized to showcase the band’s promotional tour.
The band's current single, "She Looks So Perfect," is bubbling under the threshold of the Pop Songs airplay chart (known as Mainstream Top 40 on billboard.biz and in Billboard magazine). In the week ending March 23, the song was being played on 32 monitored top 40 stations, including KIIS Los Angeles, WBBM Chicago and WIHT Washington, D.C.
The group is heading out on the road for its first U.S. tour, starting April 11 in San Francisco. They'll later join One Direction yet again, as the opening act for the Europe, U.S. and Canada legs of the British group's stadium tour, starting on May 23.
