Sabrina Carpenter crashes the charts at No. 1, again

This week’s albums and singles charts are both dominated by the same record: Sabrina Carpenter‘s Man’s Best Friend, which debuts at No. 1 and lands all 12 of its songs in the Hot 100’s top 40. At least where the charts are concerned, it’s hard to be just about any song that’s not on one of three albums: Man’s Best Friend, the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack and Morgan Wallen‘s I’m the Problem.

TOP ALBUMS

Last week, the Billboard 200 albums chart was flooded with new titles debuting in the top 20 — seven in all, plus a re-entry — as the K-pop boy band Stray Kids topped the chart for the seventh time in just three and a half years. This week, there’s significantly less action, except at the very top: Sabrina Carpenter debuts at No. 1 with her new album, Man’s Best Friend.

Carpenter, who also topped the chart with Short n’ Sweet last year, enjoys the strongest week of streaming in her career — even topping the stretch last summer when she was regularly posting three top 10 hits simultaneously. Man’s Best Friend is the week’s top seller and No. 1 in streaming… it’s a hit, to put it mildly. It’s got some heavy-duty competition to contend with in the coming weeks — most notably Taylor Swift‘s The Life of a Showgirl, which is destined to crush anything and everything in its path when it comes out Oct. 3 — but it looks like it has staying power.

The success of Man’s Best Friend is buoying other titles in Carpenter’s catalog, too: Short n’ Sweet zooms to No. 7, while 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send re-enters the Billboard 200 at No. 31.

Elsewhere in the top 10, Stray Kids’ Karma dips from No. 1 to No. 4 as its “equivalent album units” number — that’s the figure representing the cocktail of sales and streaming that’s used in formulating the Billboard 200 — drops roughly 80%. But, considering that Karma posted one of the year’s biggest debuts, an 80% drop keeps it in the top 5.

Just below the top 10, there are two more titles worth noting this week: Country singer Zach Top debuts at No. 11 with his new album, Ain’t in It for My Health — that’s a new career peak for Top, whose previous album has spent more than a year on the Billboard 200 — while up-and-coming singer-songwriter sombr climbs from No. 14 to No. 12 with his new debut album, I Barely Know Her. Expect to hear more from sombr as he and his label will likely make a push for best new artist consideration at next year’s Grammy Awards.

TOP SONGS

For the third straight week, the soundtrack to KPop Demon Hunters places a record-setting four songs in the top 10 simultaneously, led by HUNTR/X’s “Golden” at No. 1. But it’s not the only album whose songs are crowding the Hot 100 chart: All 12 tracks from Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend land in the top 40, with two of them — “Tears” debuts at No. 3 and past chart-topper “Manchild” climbs to No. 4 — in the top 5.

Scanning the current top 40, a whopping 23 songs come from just three albums: Man’s Best Friend (12), KPop Demon Hunters (7) and Morgan Wallen’s I’m the Problem (4). The 17 that remain are littered with the undead remains of past charts; 10 of them have resided in the Hot 100 for at least six months, with Teddy Swims‘ “Lose Control” registering its record-demolishing 77th week in the top 10.

All of which makes sombr’s incremental-but-steady rise — he’s got two songs, “Undressed” and “Back to Friends,” in this week’s top 40 — that much more impressive. After all, it’s never been harder for new artists to make a significant dent in the charts.

WORTH NOTING

Three weeks ago, the pop hitmaker OneRepublic hit the Billboard 200 for the eighth time in its chart career, which stretches back to 2007. But the group’s star has dimmed a bit in recent years: Its last album, 2024’s Artificial Paradise, peaked at No. 50, and none of that record’s songs hit the Hot 100. So the band did something that’s extended many chart careers: It released a greatest-hits compilation.

The Collection, which debuted at No. 46, now sits at No. 87. Which, given that OneRepublic isn’t promoting any current hits, is pretty impressive. And it demonstrates the value of a best-of compilations in the streaming era: Sure, fans could assemble a playlist with their favorite songs by a given artist. But putting all the hits on a single official “album” makes it much, much easier for legacy acts to stay on the charts. Greatest-hits sets are, by definition, one-stop shopping for casual listeners in search of familiar favorites.

A scan of this week’s Billboard 200 reveals 39 greatest-hits compilations — nearly one-fifth of the titles, led by Ed Sheeran‘s +-=÷x (Tour Collection) at No. 39. (Sheeran’s chart position will no doubt skyrocket after he performs a live Tiny Desk concert this Friday.) Scanning the chart, you’ve got best-ofs by present-day hitmakers (Post Malone, The Weeknd), as well as all-timers in rock (Queen, Journey, Lynyrd Skynyrd, et al), hip-hop (Eminem, T-Pain, 2Pac) and country (Toby Keith, George Strait, Thomas Rhett, Brooks & Dunn). You might not have expected to see, say, Nickelback or Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band on the charts in 2025, but they’re rattling around, too.

Of course, when it comes to catalog titles, greatest-hits compilations are only the beginning: Dozens more classic albums fill out much of the Billboard 200, including several by artists with greatest-hits albums on the chart (Fleetwood Mac‘s Rumours, Michael Jackson‘s Thriller, etc.), continuing runs that stretch for years — or even a decade or more.

Just one more data point to demonstrate just how difficult it is for new artists to crack the charts in 2025. There’s more competition out there than ever, from the past as much as the present.