Def Leppard Score Eighth Top 10 Album In US With ‘Diamond Star Halos’
The band’s new record moved 34,000 equivalent album units in the US n its first week of release to land at No. 10 on the Billboard 200.
According to Billboard, Def Leppard’s latest album, Diamond Star Halos, sold 34,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in its first week of release to land at position No. 10 on the Billboard 200 chart. It marks the band’s eighth top 10 LP.
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 comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). Each unit equals one album sale, or 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams generated by songs from an album.
Of “Diamond Star Halos”‘ 34,000 units earned for the week, album sales comprise 32,000, SEA units comprise 2,000 (equaling 2.7 million on-demand official streams of the album’s songs) and TEA units comprise less than 500 units.
Def Leppard’s previous Top 10 albums include Pyromania (which peaked at No. 2 in 1983), Hysteria (No. 1 for six weeks in 1988), Adrenalize (No. 1 for five weeks in 1992), Retro Active (No. 9; 1983), Rock Of Ages: The Definitive Collection (No. 10; 2005), Songs From The Sparkle Lounge (No. 5; 2008) and Def Leppard (No. 10; 2015).
Def Leppard vocalist Joe Elliott recently told Rock Candy that the album format is still important — at least for his band.
“When we got together in 2014 we noticed a trend of people releasing one song a month,” Elliott said. “They might bang them all together on an album two years later. Other people were just doing EPs. Maybe for a younger generation, an album isn’t important, because they didn’t grow up when it was. But we did.”
“We grew up in the era of Ziggy Stardust, Dark Side Of The Moon, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road — the greatest double album of all time, in my humble opinion. That’s where we come from. You can’t unscramble an egg. We invested in laying on the bed and looking at the sleeve, reading every word.”
Def Leppard will launch ‘The Stadium Tour’ with Mötley Crüe and guests Poison and Joan Jett & The Blackhearts on June 16 in Atlanta, Georgia. The 36-date trek, which is due to wrap September 9 in Las Vegas, was originally scheduled to take place in the summer of 2020 but ended up being pushed back to 2021, and then to 2022, due to the coronavirus crisis.
