Blog Posts by Paul Grein

Toby Keith lands his fourth #1 album as Bullets In The Gun enters The Billboard 200 at #1. The album sold just 71,000 copies, which is the lowest tally for any album in its first week at #1 since Nielsen/SoundScan began tracking sales for Billboard in May 1991.

Another country act, Sugarland, had held that record for about a year with its 2009 live album Live On The Inside, which sold 76,000 copies in its first week. Here's the rest of the top five (or should that be bottom five?) for albums that sold the fewest copies in their first weeks at #1: Chrisette Michele's Epiphany (83K), B.o.B's B.o.B Presents: The Adventures Of Bobby Ray (84K) and Johnny Cash's American V: A Hundred Highways (88K).

Since 1991, seven albums have sold even fewer than 71,000 copies while they headed The Billboard 200, but none of those albums were in their first weeks at #1. That makes a difference, because albums tend to lose steam over time.

Bruno Mars' story sheds a little more light on the current sales

The headline on today's Billboard Bulletin newsletter is guaranteed to catch your attention: "'Glee' Cast Breaks Beatles' Hot 100 Record." Six more songs performed by the cast of Glee crack Billboard's Hot 100 this week, bringing the Glee cast's total of Hot 100 entries to 75. This surpasses the Beatles' total of 71 Hot 100 hits. This makes the Glee cast the leader among "non solo acts" with the most charted hits since the Hot 100 was introduced in August 1958.

What's more, it seems to be just a matter of time before the Glee cast surpasses the two solo artists who have logged even more Hot 100 hits. Elvis Presley leads all artists with 108. James Brown is second with 91.

The item included a little more breathless hyperbole. The Beatles took 22 years to accumulate all those hits (they charted most recently in 1996, 26 years after they broke up). The Glee cast took just one year, four months and two weeks to amass an even larger stack of hits.

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Lil Wayne's fans are remaining loyal as the rap star nears the end of his prison sentence on a weapons possession charge. His latest album, I Am Not A Human Being, enters The Billboard 200 at #2, just behind the latest by country superstar Kenny Chesney. Lil Wayne also has 11 songs on the Hot Digital Songs chart. This puts him second only to the cast of Glee, which has 12 this week.

I Am Not A Human Being, which is a digital-only release for its first two weeks of release, is the second digital-only album to reach the top two. Hope For Haiti Now hit #1 in January. Haiti, which has sold 371,000 digital copies, has yet to be released as a CD. I Am Not A Human Being was originally also slated to be a digital exclusive, but a CD version, with three additional tracks, will be released next week.

Lil Wayne's album sold 110,000 digital copies. This is the second time that Lil Wayne has sold 100K digital copies of an album in one week. Tha Carter III sold 100K digital copies in its first week

The Zac Brown Band's You Get What You Give enters The Billboard 200 at #1 this week, ahead of Maroon5's Hands All Over, which bows at #2. The race was fairly close (153,000 for the Brown Band, compared to 142,000 for Maroon5), but those tallies only added to the good news for the Brown Band, and compounded the disappointment for Maroon5. The Brown Band's previous studio album, The Foundation, debuted at #17 with first-week sales of just 44,000. By contrast, Maroon5's previous studio album, It Won't Be Soon Before Long, debuted at #1 with first-week sales of 429,000.

You Get What You Give includes collabos with Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett, each of whom has topped The Billboard 200 on his own. The album also enters Top Country Albums at #1. The Foundation and the band's live album Pass The Jar: Live both peaked at #2.

The top 10 (and #1) entry for You Get What You Give marks a big improvement over The Foundation, which took 64 weeks to finally break into the top 10 and 75 weeks to

Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" tops the 4 million mark in paid downloads this week. That's remarkable for a song that was first released in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was in the first year of his presidency and Barack Obama was barely out of his teens. No other song that was first released before 2000 has topped the 3 million mark in paid downloads, much less 4 million.

It seemed like a good time to check in on the oldies that are selling best in the digital era. (For the purposes of this column, I define an oldie as any song that was first released prior to January 2000.) I first posted a list like this in August 2008 (here's a link to that column). At the time, I was only able to go 10-deep. That was the number of oldies that appeared on Nielsen/SoundScan's running list of the top 200 songs with the most paid downloads.

Nielsen/SoundScan has since introduced separate top 200 lists in a wide variety of genres. By drawing from all of these tallies, I was able to expand my list of

Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" tops the 4 million mark in paid downloads this week. The song was first released way back in 1981, when Madonna and Whitney Houston were still unknowns and Justin Timberlake and Beyonce were still in diapers. No other song that was first released before 2000 has topped the 3 million mark in paid downloads, much less 4 million.

"Don't Stop Believin" received a big boost from its use in the final episode of The Sopranos, which aired in June 2007. (The usage also did wonders for the song's "coolness" factor.)

The song received another boost from its use in the first episode of Glee, which aired in May 2009. It was featured again in the last episode of the first season, which aired three months ago. The two Glee versions have sold a combined total of 973,000 copies (which, of course, are not counted toward Journey's 4 million tally).

Journey's recording of "Don't Stop Believin'" hit the 1 million mark in paid downloads in August 2007. It reached 2 million

Bruno Mars' "Just The Way You Are" jumps to #1 on Hot Digital Songs, dethroning Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream." Mars' song sold 209,000 copies, bringing its eight-week total to 957,000. This is Mars' second #1 digital hit, following B.o.B's "Nothin' On You" (on which he was featured), which had two weeks on top in April. Mars is the first artist to step up from a "featured" credit on a chart-topping hit to a #1 hit of his or her own since Ke$ha, who was featured on Flo Rida's "Right Round" and then landed her own smash with "TiK ToK." (Proving that the current pop scene is completely incestuous, Mars co-wrote "Right Round.")

"Just The Way You Are" jumps to #3 on the Hot 100 and may yet unseat Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream," which logs its second week on top. Mars' song has already climbed as high as Billy Joel's (different song) "Just The Way You Are," which peaked at #3 in February 1978.

Mars (real name: Peter Hernandez) has brought a touch of old-school romance to the pop landscape.

Katy Perry's exuberant "Teenage Dream" jumps to #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 this week. It's Perry's second #1 hit in a row on that chart, following her summertime smash "California Gurls." So her new Teenage Dream album must be setting records, right? Not so much. The album has sold 281,000 copies in its first two weeks, nothing to sneeze at, but far below industry projections. (Most insiders figured it would sell about 400,000 copies in its first week, which would have it approaching 600,000 by now.)

Album sales have been dropping in recent years, but most figured that Perry had attained a level of pop stardom that would enable her to defy downward sales trends. Three of her songs ("I Kissed A Girl," "Hot N Cold" and "California Gurls") have topped the 3 million mark in digital sales. She received back-to-back Grammy nominations for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance the last two years (and will probably be in the running in that high-profile category again when this year's nominations