THE WEEKND’S BIG WEEK KEEPS GETTING BIGGER

The Weeknd is on track to have the #2 debut and #8 album with TEA of the year in his first week—and he’s also lined up to break a streaming record. His incendiary VMAs performance and his appearance in two Apple ads are just the icing on the cake for a breakout star with enormous and still accelerating momentum.

Adding the 520k TEA of the previously released four tracks, plus the current first-week projection of 385-410k, that would put the XO/Republic breakout on track to do around total 900-925k TEA year-to-date. That would enable him to edge out Fall Out Boy for Top 10 YTD sales, and place him behind only labelmate and fellow Toronto native Drake for the year's top debut.

Meanwhile, Beauty Behind The Madness has racked more than 21m streams on Spotify alone over its first four days of availability, giving it a shot to break Drake's 2015 record of 48m in one week.

This new piece of info raises our overall SPS projection to 385-410k. We’ll update our projections as necessary as additional data comes in.

As we've pointed out elsewhere, Beauty has hit the #1 spot at iTunes in 68 territories, the Top 5 in 88 and the Top 10 in 92.

The Weeknd gained additional visibility Sunday night with his starring role in a pair of premiering commercials for Apple Music. The spots (embedded below), which comprise a two-part story woven in and out of his appearance at the VMAs, show him making a playlist in the most specific representation of what the service actually does that we’ve seen since the launch.