Under his alter ego Johnny Blue Skies, Sturgill Simpson reached 3rd place on the Billboard 200 with an album only available in physical format.
Last month, Sturgill Simpson announced that his new album Mutiny After Midnight — the second under his alter ego Johnny Blue Skies — would only be released in physical formats. And for those who doubted this decision, it failed: the album just debuted directly at 3rd place on the Billboard 200.
According to Billboard, Mutiny climbed into the Top 10 with 59,000 equivalent album units sold. This is the first exclusively physical release to achieve such a performance since 2023, when Taylor Swift released Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions for Record Store Day, on sale only in independent record stores. Before that, Garth Brooks' five-CD compilation, The Anthology: Part I, The First Five Yearsmore widely distributed than Folklorestarted in 4th place in 2017.
But as Simpson pointed out on Instagram, Mutiny is not a compilation. “So this is the ONLY album of original music to do this since… we don’t know when? » he wrote. “Maybe Billboard can provide us with this information…”
Vinyl, cassette and chaos
Simpson has not yet announced tour dates for Mutinybut just making the charts with only physical sales is already a victory for this disco-country record. “Wanna start a revolution and watch it begin”Simpson sings on the opening track, “Make America Fuck Again”. Amen.
