Chart Watch

  • Bob Dylan lands his 18th top 10 album on The Billboard 200 this week as Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8 enters the chart at #6. Only five artists have amassed more top 10 albums since Billboard published its first album chart (a top 10 listing) in March 1945.

    A total of 14 artists have accumulated 15 or more top 10 albums since 1945. The list includes many of the greatest stars in recording history. Most of these acts are still adding to their totals. Twelve have had top 10 albums within the last five years. Ten have reached the top 10 within just the last two years.

    Frank Sinatra is the act with the most top 10 albums (40) and also the act with the longest span of top 10 albums (62 years). Ol' Blue Eyes landed his first top 10 album in the first year of Harry S. Truman's presidency. He landed his most recent in the last year of George W. Bush's.

    I counted only albums that made the top 10 on The Billboard 200, not on such lower-profile charts as Top Catalog Albums or Top

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  • Britney Spears' "Womanizer" zooms from #96 to #1 on Billboard's Hot 100. It's her first #1 on that flagship chart since her debut single "...Baby One More Time" hit #1 in January 1999, when Spears was just 17. Spears has  maintained such a high profile over the past decade, it's hard to imagine that she has gone this long without a #1 single. She has had four #1 albums and has been on the cover of a magazine or two, but her highest-charting Hot 100 single since 1999 was last year's "Gimme More," which peaked at #3.

    This is the third time in the past two months that the record for the biggest move to #1 on the Hot 100 has been broken. In September, T.I.'s "Whatever You Like" vaulted from #71 to #1. And just last week, T.I.'s "Live Your Life" (featuring Rihanna) made an even more dramatic move, leaping from #80 to #1.

    "Womanizer" debuts at #1 on Hot Digital Songs, with 286,000 paid downloads. That sets a new record for the biggest first-week sales by a female artist, barely edging out

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  • T.I.'s new hit "Live Your Life" (featuring Rihanna) vaults from #80 to #1 on Billboard's Hot 100, setting a new record for the biggest jump into the top spot in the chart's 50-year history. The old record, set just six weeks ago, was by the rapper's previous release, "Whatever You Like," which surged from #71 to #1. "Live Your Life" sold 335,000 downloads this week to also debut at #1 on the Hot Digital Songs chart. That's the largest weekly tally of 2008. In the history of downloading, only "Low" by Flo Rida featuring T-Pain has sold more downloads in a week. It sold 467,000 in the week after Christmas, when "Low" was in its ninth week. So "Live Your Life" sets a record for the most paid downloads by a debuting single. (Mariah Carey had held the first-week record when "Touch My Body" opened with sales of 286,000 downloads in March.)

    "Live Your Life" bumps "Whatever You Like" out of the top spot on both the Hot 100 and Hot Digital Songs. T.I. is the first artist to replace himself at

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  • If you've been anywhere near a radio in the past four months, you've heard Jesse McCartney's "Leavin'" countless times. The amiable pop tune has sold 1,360,000 downloads, making it the #24 best-selling song of the year. So McCartney's album, Departure, must be a big hit, right?

    Not really. Departure has sold 118,000 copies, not enough to put it on Nielsen/SoundScan's running list of the year's top 200 albums.

    "Sexy Can I" by Ray J & Yung Berg is an even bigger hit. The slinky R&B smash has sold 1,843,000 downloads, making it the 12th best-selling song of the year. The collaboration is featured on both artists' albums, Ray J's All I Feel and Yung Berg's Look What You Made Me.  As of this week, the two albums have sold 157,000 copies. Combined.

    Welcome to the modern music business, where even big hits don't necessarily sell large numbers of albums.

    Let's try one more. Leona Lewis' elegant and soulful ballad "Bleeding Love" (which Jesse McCartney co-wrote) has sold 3,165,000 downloads,

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  • Demi Lovato's debut album, Don't Forget, enters The Billboard 200 at #2. Lovato played the female lead in the Disney Channel's TV movie, Camp Rock. She also sang three songs on the soundtrack, which tops the million-unit sales mark this week. One of them, "This Is Me" (a duet with Joe Jonas), became the album's biggest hit. Lovato, 16, is the latest in a long line of performers to parlay exposure on Disney TV shows into hit records of their own.

    Annette Funicello was just 12 in 1955 when the original The Mickey Mouse Club premiered and quickly became a baby-boomer obsession. Annette had four top 20 hits in 1959 and 1960, including "Tall Paul" and "Pineapple Princess." The latter was from her album, Hawaiiannette. (It was a more innocent time.)

    Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were regulars on a revival of The Mickey Mouse Club in 1992-93 (as was future Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling.) All three burst to major pop stardom in the late '90s. Even more remarkably, all

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  • To paraphrase the famous subtitle of a 1960 Elvis Presley compilation, 50,000,000 Metallica fans can't be wrong. Metallica this week becomes the first hard-rock band-and only the fifth act overall-to top the 50,000,000 mark in album sales since Nielsen/SoundScan began tracking U.S. sales in May 1991.

    There were charts before 1991, of course. Billboard first ran an album chart in March 1945. It became a regular weekly feature 11 years later. But precise sales figures weren't authenticated and made public until Nielsen/SoundScan brought the business into the modern bar-code-reading age (for better and for worse).

    To mark the occasion, I'm counting down the top 15 acts that have sold the most albums in Nielsen/SoundScan history. Four of the artists on this list are so new that their entire chart careers are contained in the Nielsen/SoundScan era. Eminem debuted in 1999, making him the newest arrival on the list.

    At the other extreme, three of the artists in the top 15 released their first

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  • You know the voice even if you've forgotten the name. Darius Rucker was the lead singer for Hootie & the Blowfish, which burst out of South Carolina to a record a string of hits in the mid-'90s. And then, almost as quickly as they found fame, they seemed to vanish. Rucker is back and finding success in an unexpected place-the country charts. His single, "Don't Think I Don't Think About It" jumps to #1 on the country chart. It's the first #1 by an African American artist since Charley Pride's "Night Games" topped the chart in July 1983. Pride, the most successful African American country artist of all time (admittedly, it's a short list), had 29 #1 country hits between 1969 and 1983. The best known is 1971's "Kiss An Angel Good Mornin'."

    Rucker also enters the country album chart at #1 with his second solo album, Learn To Live. Rucker is the first African American artist to top this chart since Ray Charles scored in March 1985 with Friendship, a collection of duets. The only other

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  • Metallica's studio first album in more than five years, Death Magnetic, enters The Billboard 200 at #1. It's Metallica's fifth #1 album, a total topped by only one hard rock band in history. Led Zeppelin amassed seven #1 albums between Led Zeppelin II in 1969 and How The West Was Won in 2003. Van Halen is the only other hard rock band to land five #1 albums. The group, which like Metallica was formed in Los Angeles, topped the chart with five albums between 5150 in 1986 and Best Of Volume 1 in 1996.

    Metallica surpasses these other top bands in two respects. Metallica is the first hard rock act to reach #1 with five consecutive #1 studio albums. Led Zeppelin and Van Halen each had four straight #1 studio sets. Also, Metallica is the top-selling hard rock band since Nielsen/SoundScan took over tracking for Billboard in May 1991. AC/DC is in second place.

    Death Magnetic posted first-week sales of 490,000. Impressively, the band ran up this total in just three days, between the release of

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  • If you had told me at any point after, say, 1992 that New Kids On The Block would one day have another top five album, I would have assumed you were either a die-hard fan, the group's publicist or quite possibly delusional. But that's just what happens this week as The Block opens at #2. It's the group's first top five album since Step By Step topped the chart in June 1990.

    Comebacks are always unpredictable, but it's especially hard for one-time teen idols to re-emerge. Their fans have grown up and may be a tad embarrassed by their youthful infatuations. This has hurt a long line of former teen idols, from Bobby Rydell to Bobby Sherman. Among the many others who have found it hard to overcome the stigma of being a former teen star: Fabian, David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy and, most recently, Rick Springfield.

    New Kids' nostalgic, mid-tempo ballad "Summertime" was an ideal lead single from this album. It has solid 505,000 downloads in the past 17 weeks. And three weeks ago, a Greatest Hits

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  • We all knew that The Game's LAX and Slipknot's All Hope Is Gone were locked in a tight race for #1 on the Billboard album chart. But when the numbers came in, it was breathtaking just how tight it was. The margin between the two albums was in the low double-digits. Billboard's Keith Caulfield reported that it was the closest race between the #1 and #2 albums since the magazine began using Nielsen SoundScan sales data in May 1991. He calculated the margin between the two albums at .005%.

    The winner, by this narrowest of margins, was The Game. But about 12 hours after the initial result was posted, Nielsen/SoundScan reran the numbers and declared Slipknot as the winner. It's not uncommon for Nielsen/SoundScan to adjust the final sales tallies. It's just that the tallies have rarely been so close that the final adjustment reversed the order of finish for the top two albums.

    So (assuming Nielsen/SoundScan isn't going to re-rerun the numbers, and I'm not sure my heart can take it), the

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Pagination

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News for You

  • Actress Bynes accused of bong toss out NYC window

    NEW YORK (AP) — Actress Amanda Bynes appeared disheveled in a long blond wig and sweats Friday in a criminal court where she was charged with reckless endangerment after police said she heaved a marijuana bong out the window of her 36th-floor Manhattan apartment.

  • Latest 'Bachelorette' won't say if she's engaged

    NEW YORK (AP) — ABC's newest "Bachelorette," Desiree Hartsock, says it's not hard to keep the details of her experience on the show a secret from her friends.

  • Jersey shore reopens for 1st post-Sandy summer

    SEASIDE HEIGHTS, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey rolled out some of its big guns Friday to proclaim that the shore is back following Superstorm Sandy, using Gov. Chris Christie and the cast of MTV's "Jersey Shore" to tell a national audience the state is ready for summer fun.

  • Takei says Cho good choice for latest 'Star Trek'

    SINGAPORE (AP) — Portraying USS Enterprise helmsman Hikaru Sulu in the latest "Star Trek" movie comes with big shoes to fill, but the man who played the part in the TV series and six films has given his blessing to the actor currently playing the role.

  • Rare Superman comic found in house insulation

    MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — It's considered the Holy Grail of comic books: Action Comics No. 1 from 1938, featuring the debut of Superman. And David Gonzales found one mixed in with old newspapers insulating a house he was renovating in a small town in Minnesota.

  • Actress Bynes arrested in NYC on marijuana charge

    NEW YORK (AP) — Police say actress Amanda Bynes has been arrested in midtown Manhattan after she heaved a marijuana bong out of a window.

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