Adele's "Someone Like You" vaults from #19 to #1 in its ninth week on the Hot 100. That's the biggest leap into the top spot since "What's My Name?" by Rihanna featuring Drake vaulted from #60 to #1 in November. (I'm discounting a pair of subsequent songs that debuted at #1: Britney Spears' "Hold It Against Me" and Lady Gaga's "Born This Way.")

Lil Wayne's Tha Carter IV sold a whopping 964,000 copies in its first week. That's the second biggest one-week sales tally of the year. It trails only Lady Gaga's Born This Way, which sold a discount-boosted 1,108,000 copies in May. It's the heftiest tally for a rap or hip-hop album since Tha Carter III debuted in June 2008 with sales of 1,006,000.

9/11 triggered a flood of emotions, so it's fitting that the songs that are linked to the tragedy also reflect a wide range of moods. These songs range from Alan Jackson's tender and thoughtful "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)" to Ray Stevens' novelty record "Osama-Yo' Mama."

Though Mick Jagger hasn't topped the Hot 100 in 33 years, he remains an icon. "Moves Like Jagger" by Maroon 5 featuring Christina Aguilera this week becomes the second #1 hit in less than two years that name-checks the rock legend. The first was Ke$ha's "TiK ToK," which spent the first nine weeks of 2010 at #1.

Barbra Streisand this week becomes the the first solo artist to put an album in the top five on The Billboard 200 in six different decades. She accomplishes the feat as What Matters Most: Barbra Sings The Lyrics Of Alan and Marilyn Bergman debuts at #4. One group, The Rolling Stones, has put an album in the top five in each of the last six decades, though their only album to score so far in this decade was a reissue of their 1972 classic Exile On Main St. Streisand kept her string going the old-fashioned way: by going into the studio and recording a new album.

Even a casual observer of the pop music scene knows that this has been Adele's year. The British singer has the year's top-selling album, 21, and the year's most popular song, "Rolling In The Deep."

It's only August, but Adele's "Rolling In The Deep" has already sold more digital copies than any other song has in any calendar year. Adele's song has sold 4,825,000 copies since the beginning of the year. The previous champ, the Black Eyed Peas' "Boom Boom Pow," sold 4,762,000 digital copies in 2009.

Album sales aren't what they used to be, but evidently no one told Adele's fans. Her sophomore album 21 tops the 3 million mark in U.S. sales this week. Even in the music industry's heyday, a "triple platinum" album was a big deal.