AC/DC scored their first No. 1 debut when Black Ice entered atop the Billboard 200 chart dated November 8, 2008. Nielsen SoundScan counted 784,000 U.S. copies sold in its opening week. It was the band’s second album to lead that chart, following For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) in 1981.
The album had reached American stores on October 20, ending the eight-year gap after Stiff Upper Lip. Recorded at the Warehouse Studio in Vancouver with producer Brendan O’Brien, its 15 tracks opened with “Rock N Roll Train.” Angus Young described O’Brien’s influence in Classic Rock: the guitarist often began with rhythm and a rough vocal idea, while the producer pressed him to develop the melody. The familiar guitar attack had a producer pushing the songs’ hooks forward.
The route to record buyers was equally deliberate. In the United States, Black Ice was sold exclusively through Walmart, Sam’s Club and AC/DC’s website. It wasn’t available as a legal download. Fans buying the new music were buying a physical album.
The band had chosen a retailer that already reached a substantial part of its audience. In Robert Levine’s October 2008 report for The New York Times, Columbia said Walmart had accounted for half of AC/DC’s sales the previous year. Angus also explained the attachment behind the band’s refusal to divide albums into individually purchased downloads. “You get very close to the albums,” he said, comparing a finished record to a painting its creator wanted to protect. That preference kept the whole collection at the center of the release, even while “Rock N Roll Train” introduced it on radio.
Walmart gave that collection far more space than a place in the CD racks. Billboard described dedicated displays bringing the new album together with AC/DC’s earlier records, T-shirts and other merchandise. Shoppers encountered a substantial selection of the band’s work alongside its first new studio material in years. The debut delivered the biggest sales week for a rock act since November 2004, a substantial result for the exclusive-release campaign during a period of declining album sales.
The older records benefited, too. Reuters reported that AC/DC’s catalog sold another 92,000 copies during the same tracking week. Back in Black accounted for 21,000 of those, up from 9,000 the week before. Those purchases weren’t folded into Black Ice’s total, and the older albums were ineligible for the Billboard 200 under the chart’s rules at the time. The launch was selling a new record while drawing buyers back to music the band had made decades earlier.
Black Ice held No. 1 for a second week, adding approximately 271,000 U.S. sales. Columbia reported that its first two weeks had taken the album past one million copies.
