Pop Smoke’s ‘Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon’ Debuts at No. 1
Written by SOURCE on July 12, 2020
Pop Smoke has scored the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 with his debut full-length studio album, Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon.
His posthumous LP has pulled in 251,000 units, which accounted for 268.44 million on-demand streams, with 59,000 units coming from album sales that were aided by a variety of bundle offers. It’s the sixth biggest debut of 2020, and the largest posthumous opening since Michael Jackson’s This Is It, which earned 373,000 units in 2009.
HDD originally estimated that Pop’s project would open with 175,000-195,000 in total activity, later revising that number to somewhere between 200,000-225,000. The album arrived on July 3 via Pop Smoke’s manager Steven Victor’s UMG imprint Victor Victor and Republic, with 50 Cent acting as executive producer.
During his last editorial interview, Pop Smoke revealed his future career plans to Complex: “I gotta stay fully focused. Tunnel vision,” he said. “I gotta be selfish for right now, until you build your empire to where you could bring people in and help them. That’s the only way you gon’ be the best.”
Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon was also the subject of Complex’s new cover story, where the 40-plus people who worked on the rapper’s album discussed the creation process.
“Pop and I always had the same conversation about the debut album,” the rapper’s manager, Steven Victor said while discussing Pop’s run of mixtapes leading up to the record. “Meet the Woo 1 and Meet the Woo 2 are each one thought. And the album was supposed to be a series of thoughts. It was supposed to be the whole picture of what he could do musically and creatively. It’s the whole picture of what’s in his mind and in his heart. The mixtapes were just one sound, and the album is where he would get those different thoughts out, so people could get to know him.”
