Comedian and singer “Weird Al” Yankovic is on course for his first No. 1 album, as Mandatory Fun could debut atop the Billboard 200 chart next week.
Industry forecasters suggest the album, which was released on July 15, might sell over 80,000 copies by the end of the tracking week on Sunday, July 20. That would also snare Yankovic his best sales week since Nielsen SoundScan started tracking sales in 1991.
The Billboard 200’s new top 10 will be revealed on Wednesday, July 23.
As of Friday, the sales projection for Mandatory Fun was just ahead of another new album in the race for No. 1: Jason Mraz’s Yes! The latter set might sell around 75,000 to 80,000.
Mraz is also in the hunt for his first No. 1 album.
Mraz has previously topped out at No. 2 with his last album, 2012’s Love Is a Four Letter Word. In total, he’s collected three top 10 sets. As for Yankovic, he’s claimed two top 10 efforts, though his chart history stretches back much farther than Mraz’s. Yankovic arrived on the Billboard 200 back in May 1983 with his self-titled album, containing his first Billboard Hot 100 hit, “Ricky” (a spoof of Toni Basil’s No. 1 “Mickey”). Mraz, meanwhile, made his Billboard 200 debut 20 years later with Waiting for My Rocket to Come.
Yankovic’s highest-charting album so far is his previous set, 2011’s Alpocalypse, which debuted and peaked at No. 9.
Also set for sizable debuts on next week’s Billboard 200: Rise Against’s The Black Market (around 60,000), the new Kidz Bop 26 album (50,000), Bleachers’ Strange Desire (18,000) and Marsha Ambrosius’ Friends & Lovers (15,000).
