Christina Aguilera's Lotus enters The Billboard 200 at #7 with first-week sales of 73K.  That's a lower debut position and first-week sales tally than Aguilera's last album, Bionic, which bowed at #3 in June 2010 with first-week sales of 111K. Here's the puzzling part: Aguilera's visibility was low back then. She has since starred in a movie, Burlesque, with Cher (which grossed just under $40 million); landed a #1 hit as a featured artist on Maroon 5's "Moves Like Jagger" and become a TV star on The Voice. Given all that, you might have expected her new album to, at the very least, improve on the showing of Bionic.

The album's first single, "Your Body," peaked at a disappointing #34 on the Hot 100. "Just A Fool," a collabo with Blake Shelton, her fellow judge on The Voice, is expected to debut this week.

Aerosmith's Music From Another Dimension!, the band's first album of new material in more than 11 years (and thus its first since Steven Tyler's two-year gig on American Idol broadened his fame), enters The Billboard 200 at a disappointing #5. The ho-hum sales (63K) hardly merit the exclamation point in the album title. The band's last three albums of new material, 1993's Get A Grip, 1997's Nine Lives and 2001's Just Push Play, all debuted at #1 or #2. (They posted first week sales of 171K, 140K and 240K, respectively.)

The new album debuts in the same position as Honkin' On Bobo, Aerosmith's 2004 album of blues and soul covers. That album was viewed by many fans as an interim project between full-fledged studio albums. (Even so, it outsold the new release. It sold 161K copies in its first week.)

By now, you've all heard that Taylor Swift's Red sold 1,208,000 copies in its first week, the highest first-week total since Eminem's The Eminem Show sold 1,322,000 copies in its first full week in 2002. It's hard to imagine now, but before Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales for Billboard in 1991, sales tallies were rarely divulged (and when they were, by the record companies themselves, they were no doubt inflated).

All we had to go on was The Billboard 200 chart itself. Until 1991, it was rare for albums to debut at #1. Even the biggest artists had to climb through the ranks to reach #1. Artists earned bragging rights not by the number of albums they sold in the first week, but by reaching #1 faster than any other album that year.

I've gone back through the charts and determined the album that rose to #1 the fastest in every year from 1956, when the chart became a weekly feature in Billboard, to 1990, the last year before Nielsen SoundScan's arrival made sales tallies public information and #1 debuts commonplace.

Chris Brown's "Don't Wake Me Up" jumps to #10 on the Hot 100. It's Brown's second top 10 hit of the year, following "Turn Up The Music," which peaked at #10 in March. This marks the first time that Brown has had multiple top 10 hits in a calendar year since 2008, when he amassed four (counting a featured credit on Lil Mama's "Shawty Get Loose").

That, of course, was before Brown's career was put in serious peril by his assault on Rihanna on the eve of the Grammys in 2009. Brown didn't return to the top 10 until the spring of 2011, when he peaked at #6 with "Look At Me Now "(featuring Lil Wayne and Busta Rhymes).

Why is Brown's career on the upswing? Some time has passed. Also, "Don't Wake Me Up" and "Turn Up The Music" are both first-rate pop records. They were so good they couldn't be denied. You could even make an argument that they'd both have charted higher than #10 if the incident had never happened. Brown's 2008 hits, after all, included two #2 hits ("With You" and "Forever") and a #3 ("No Air," a collabo with Jordin Sparks).