15-Month-Old Bon Jovi Album Hits #1 Thanks To Concert Ticket Bundle
Bon Jovi’s former #1 album, This House Is Not For Sale, is back atop the Billboard 200 chart for a second week.
The set re-enters the tally with 120,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending March 1, according to Nielsen Music, up from a negligible figure in the previous week. Essentially all of its sum is traditional album sales. The surge back to #1 is owed nearly entirely to sales generated by a concert ticket/album sale redemption offer with Bon Jovi’s upcoming US arena tour.
The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption, which includes traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA), and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). The new March 10-dated chart (where Bon Jovi returns to #1) will be posted in full on Billboard’s websites on Tuesday (March 6).
This House Is Not For Sale first led the Billboard 200 on Nov. 26, 2016, when it opened in the penthouse with 129,000 units (128,000 in album sales), also driven by a ticket/album sale redemption offer. The set marked the band’s sixth chart-topper.
Bon Jovi’s tour kicks off on March 14 at the Pepsi Center in Denver. The 24-date U.S. trek is slated to wrap on May 24 at the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C. In total, Billboard estimates the tour may sell between 350,000 and 375,000 tickets.
For the tour’s ticket/album sale redemption offer, the price of the standard CD edition of This House Is Not For Sale was bundled into the purchase price of each ticket sold online to the tour. Customers received, via email, a redemption offer for the album, where they could choose to redeem the CD and have it mailed to them. The only sales that count towards the charts are those albums that are redeemed by customers. Many ticket buyers never redeem the offer.
This House Is Not For Sale is the second album to re-enter the Billboard 200 straight in at #1, following Chris Stapleton’s Traveller. The latter returned to the list on Nov. 21, 2015, jumping in at #1 for the first time, thanks to buzz generated by Stapleton’s big night on the 2015 Country Music Association Awards. Further, This House Is Not For Sale’s 15-month gap between stints at #1 is the longest amount of time for an album to reclaim the summit.
A version of this article originally appeared on Billboard.