The soundtrack to hit supervillain movie Suicide Squad has shot to the top of Billboard's album charts, where it has debuted in the No. 1 spot. The collection, which includes hits by Skrillex and Rick Ross, Twenty One Pilots, and Panic! At The Disco has also broken the record for most streams of a soundtrack album, beating former record holder Fifty Shades of Grey.
Despite the record-breaking streaming numbers, the Suicide Squad soundtrack actually racked up more of its numbers based upon traditional album sales than streaming units. The record sold a total of 182,000 album equivalent units, 128,000 of which comprised traditional album sales. The remainder of sales consisted of track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). The 22,000 SEA unit total was equal to more than 32 million streams for the songs on the collection, which obliterated the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack's record of 10,000 SEA units, or 14.4 million streams.
The success of the soundtrack appears to rest largely on the popularity of the movie, which despite mixed reviews from many critics has emerged as one of 2016's biggest summer blockbusters. The diversity of the songs in the collection also means the record has wide audience appeal, with genres from rock to hip hop to pop and oldies covered on the album.
Kevin Weaver, Atlantic Records' president of Film and TV recently talked about putting the Suicide Squad soundtrack together, a process he says began very early in the timeline of the movie's development.
"We were fortunate enough to spend a lot of time with the director of the film, David Ayer, explained Weaver. "We started to identify the various music cues, what the sound of the movie was going to be, what we all felt the music needs of the picture were. As we did that, we started evaluating a list of artists that we liked and thought would be meaningful contributors and speak to the creative needs of the picture. Then we began the process of trying to align those artists with the various moments in the film."
The result is the biggest debut for a soundtrack album on Billboard's charts since Fifty Shades of Grey in February 2015. Despite debuting at No. 2, that collection actually scored a slightly higher first week total than Suicide Squad, thanks in large part to the success of single "Love Me Like You Do" by Ellie Goulding, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Whether the collection will remain at the top next week depends as much on the continued success of the movie as it does on the popularity of the individual songs released from the Suicide Squad soundtrack, which include "Heathens" by Twenty One Pilots and "Purple Lamborghini" by Skrillex and Rick Ross.
