Iron Maiden just charted its best-ever album debut in 45 years, thanks to…CDs

How does a 45-year old heavy metal band with fewer than 10 million monthly Spotify listeners manage to break into the best-performing albums of 2021?

The answer is, true to the band’s style, rather old-fashioned: By throwing vinyl LPs and CDs into Targets and Wal-Marts.

Over the past week, while Kanye West and Drake drew most of the chart attention in the battle between Donda and Certified Lover Boy for Number One, Iron Maiden quietly made waves of its own when the long-running heavy metal fixture scored its highest-ever chart debut for Senjutsu, the band’s 17th studio album. Senjutsu bowed at Number Four on the Rolling Stone 200 Albums chart, and it got to Number Three on Billboard’s 200 — nabbing a larger opening than even the band’s platinum-certified classics like Powerslave and The Number of the Beast.

Senjutsu is also one of just five rock albums overall, and the only heavy metal album, to open to a top-five debut this year.

Rather than relying on streaming, nearly 90 percent of Senjutsu’s sales came from pure album sales, Rolling Stone chart data shows, and the ratio represents by far the highest percentage of pure album sales on the chart. (Imagine Dragons’ latest project Mercury – Act 1 was a distant second at 50 percent). Of those album sales, nearly 70 percent came from large physical retailers, reflecting a largely physical-driven market that the band further bolstered with exclusives at stores.

Iron Maiden can move product, so the band’s team pushed hard on collectibles and physical product, sending out 15,000 special edition CDs to Target and 10,000 limited edition red vinyl to Wal-Mart, along with posters with the record for the indie retailers. “We decided we wanted to live at Target after not being in those stores for over a decade,” Michael Kachko, senior vice president of catalog recordings at Iron Maiden’s label BMG, tells Rolling Stone. “Given the decreasing retail space, we thought fans would show up. We’ve built a great relationship with Wal-Mart over the last few years. We knew where we had success between Book of Souls and now, with that album and with other catalog initiatives. So we fed into that and executed well. It’s a good place to be to attract the retailers by giving something unique.”

> Culture