Monster Sales Projected for Lady Gaga’s ‘Star Is Born’ Soundtrack – Variety

The “A Star Is Born” soundtrack is a star in its own right.Sources watching retail reports come in from the album’s first five days of sales say it’s expected to debut with more than 200,000 copies sold in its first week, not accounting for streaming or other forms of consumption.Official figures won’t be announced till Sunday.But if those numbers hold up, it would be the biggest week in pure album sales for the soundtrack to a movie musical since “Frozen” in 2014.A figure over 200,000 would also give “A Star Is Born” easily the best opening tally for any soundtrack in 2018, surpassing another Interscope release that currently holds that title, “Black Panther: The Album.”The album’s success is vindicating the strategy to withhold all of the music — with the exception of a single, “Shallow” — until the day of the movie’s release last Friday.That plan may have come about primarily from a desire to keep the songs as surprises for moviegoers as the tunes pop up in key emotional moments in the film, but it also had the effect of sending Lady Gaga fans and enraptured attendees to retail all at once.With swooning word of mouth likely to generate a strong holdover in the theaters, Interscope Records is hoping for sustained album sales, too, of the sort that had the slower-growing “Greatest Showman” at or near the top of the charts for multiple weeks early this year.The expected 200K+ bow for “A Star Is Born” should put it in the No.1 spot comfortably ahead of some other big releases that came out Oct.5, including Twenty One Pilots’ “Trench” and Eric Church’s “Desperate Man,” as well as a strong second week for Lil Wayne.Individual tracks from the soundtrack by Gaga and Bradley Cooper have also been dominating daily digital singles charts.