Cher Ties Solo-Career-Best Rank on Billboard 200 as 'Dancing Queen' Debuts at No. 3

10/7/2018 by Keith Caulfield

The album launches with 2018’s biggest sales week for a pop album by a woman.

Cher’s new album Dancing Queen debuts at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, tying for the diva’s highest-charting solo album ever. It also earns the biggest sales week of 2018 for a pop album by a woman, and Cher’s largest sales week since Nielsen Music began electronically tracking music sales in 1991.

The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units. Units are comprised of traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). The new Oct. 13-dated chart -- where Dancing Queen debuts at No. 3 -- will be posted in full on Billboard's websites on Tuesday, Oct. 9.

As previously reported, Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter V debuts at No. 1 on the latest Billboard 200 chart.

Cher also reached No. 3 with her previous studio set, 2013’s Closer to the Truth. (Cher was also one-half of Sonny & Cher, which peaked at No. 2 on the chart in 1965 with Look at Us.)

Dancing Queen -- comprised entirely of ABBA covers -- bows with 153,000 units, of which 150,000 are in album sales. The set generated about 1,000 in TEA units and 2,000 in SEA units. Dancing Queen’s sturdy bow was encouraged by sales generated from a concert ticket/album sale redemption offer for her upcoming U.S. tour, as well as old-fashioned album sales through stores like Target, Walmart, iTunes, Amazon and the like.

Dancing Queen is also the top-selling album of the week with 150,000 copies sold. It marks Cher’s first No. 1 on the Top Album Sales chart and her largest sales week for an album since Nielsen Music began electronically tracking sales in 1991. Cher’s previous biggest one-week sales sum came in 2003, when The Very Best of Cher started with 122,000 copies sold (April 14, 2003 chart).

Dancing Queen also tallies the biggest sales week for a pop album by a woman in 2018, and the second-largest sales frame for a pop set this year (trailing only the debut week of Justin Timberlake’s Man of the Woods, when it started with 242,000 copies sold on the Feb. 17-dated list). The last pop album by a woman to yield a larger sales week was Taylor Swift’s reputation, which sold 232,000 in its second stanza (chart dated Dec. 9, 2017).