5 Seconds of Summer Make Chart Debut As 'Perfect' EP Sales Forecast Sizzles
3/27/2014 by Keith Caulfield , William Gruger
The Australian pop-rock quartet 5 Seconds of Summer, which opened for One Direction on the bulk of its 2013 arena tour, is tracking to make a very splashy debut on the Billboard 200 albums chart in two weeks.
Its four-song EP, "She Looks So Perfect," is due out April 1 in the United States on Capitol Records. The set could sell upwards of 150,000 to 200,000 copies in its first week, according to industry forecasters.
That sizable prognostication is based partly on robust pre-orders of the set in the iTunes Store, in addition to first-week performance of comparable albums, media exposure, radio and YouTube trends for an album's first single, and so on.
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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.