Chart Watch
  • We'll all celebrate Thanksgiving this week, but some artists have reasons to be especially thankful this year. Here's a round-up of artists (and others) who have much for which to give thanks. I'll follow it with a list of artists who had big "turkeys" this year. (No fair jumping ahead to the snarky stuff.)

    Taylor Swift—In October, Swift posted the biggest one-week sales tally (1,208,000) in more than 10 years. She's only the fourth artist (and the first woman) to top the 1 million mark in weekly sales more than once. As a little bonus, she landed her first #1 single on the Hot 100.

    Adele—In February, she tied Beyonce's record for most Grammys won in one night by a female artist (six). 21 will make Adele the first artist to have the #1 album of the year on Billboard's year-end chart recap two years running since Michael Jackson's Thriller in 1983-1984.

    Read More »from Chart Watch Extra: Thanksgiving Or Turkey Time?
  • Maroon 5's "One More Night" logs its ninth week at #1 on the Hot 100, which ties Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" for the longest run on top so far this year. Maroon 5 and Jepsen have some history: "Call Me Maybe" kept M5's previous hit, "Payphone," from reaching #1 this past summer. ("Call Me Maybe" blocked "Payphone" for five weeks; "Somebody That I Used To Know" by Gotye featuring Kimbra had earlier blocked it for one week.)

    "One More Night" has had this long run at #1 on the Hot 100 even though it never reached #1 on Hot Digital Songs. It spent three weeks at #2. It's the first song to log nine or more weeks at #1 on the Hot 100 without topping Hot Digital Songs since Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together," which topped the Hot 100 for 14 weeks in 2005 but, likewise, stalled at #2 on Hot Digital Songs. In both cases, heavy radio airplay made up for digital sales that were a little softer than you might have expected.

    Read More »from Week Ending Nov. 11, 2012. Songs: Maroon 5 Ties Year’s Record
  • 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.)

    Read More »from Week Ending Nov. 11, 2012. Albums: Aerosmith’s Pitchy Debut
  • Less than a week after Blake Shelton walked off with three awards at the Country Music Assn. Awards (including Entertainer of the Year), his fellow judge on The Voice, Adam Levine, has something to crow about: Maroon 5's "One More Night" logs its eighth week at #1 on the Hot 100. It's the longest-running #1 hit of the year by an American artist.

    Maroon 5 has had three blockbuster hits since the show debuted on NBC in April 2011: "Moves Like Jagger" (featuring fellow judge Christina Aguilera), "Payphone" (featuring Wiz Khalifa) and now "One More Night." The three songs have sold a combined total of 12,707,000 digital copies in the U.S.

    Read More »from Week Ending Nov. 4, 2012. Songs: The Power Of “The Voice”
  • It's just the first week of November, but there are five Christmas albums in the top 30 on The Billboard 200. Rod Stewart's Merry Christmas Baby debuts at #3, which is the highest ranking for a Christmas album so far this season. Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Dreams Of Fireflies (On A Christmas Night) debuts at #9, Lady Antebellum's On This Winter's Night drops from #9 to #15 in its second week, Scotty McCreery's Christmas With Scotty McCreery drops from #15 to #21 in its third week and Blake Shelton's Cheers, It's Christmas leaps from #45 to #28 in its fifth week.

    Read More »from Week Ending Nov. 4, 2012. Albums: Christmas In November
  • 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.

    Read More »from Chart Watch Extra: The Fastest-Rising #1 Albums
  • 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).

    Read More »from Week Ending Oct. 28, 2012. Songs: Chris Brown’s Comeback
  • Taylor Swift's Red sold 1,208,000 copies in its first week, the greatest one-week total since Eminem's The Eminem Show sold 1,322,000 in its first full week in June 2002. It's the second-highest one-week sales tally ever for a female artist. Britney Spears' Oops!...I Did It Again sold 1,319,000 in its first week in May 2000. (Swift should get extra credit for degree of difficulty. It's much harder to do this now than it was back then when records were, you know, selling.)

    Wrap your head around this: Red sold more copies than every other album in the top 50 combined. (More than every other album in the top 52, to be precise.)

    The tally for Red is up from the 1,047,000 that Swift's previous album, Speak Now, sold in its first week in October 2010. And that was up from the 592K copies that her sophomore album, Fearless, sold its first week in November 2008. And that was way up from the 39K that her first album, Taylor Swift, sold in its first week in October 2006.

    Swift is one of only four artists to ring up first-week sales of 1 million or more copies more than once. The others are Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC and Eminem. This makes Swift the first female artist and the first country artist to achieve this feat. And she's just the second artist, following Backstreet Boys, to see its sales increase from its first million-selling first-week to its second. Details below.

    Read More »from Week Ending Oct. 28, 2012. Albums: 1,208,000!
  • Taylor Swift has a new album out, in case you haven't heard. OK, you've heard, you've heard. The only thing that's receiving more attention these days is how a few thousand undecided voters in Ohio are leaning from hour to hour.

    Red is expected to ring up the highest one-week sales tally since 50 Cent's The Massacre sold 1,141,000 copies in its first week in March 2005. (If everything falls into place, Red could even achieve the highest one-week total since Eminem's The Eminem Show sold 1,322,000 copies in its first full week of release in June 2002.)

    Read More »from Chart Watch Extra: Swift’s Sizzling First Week
  • It's hard to imagine that Katy Perry has been a star for just four years. Her first hit, "I Kissed A Girl," entered the Hot 100 the week of May 24, 2008. It debuted at #76—the week's sixth highest of 10 debuts. That may be the last time that Perry was in the middle of the pack. The song shot to #1 six weeks later, displacing Coldplay's "Viva La Vida."

    Thursday is Perry's 28th birthday. To mark the occasion, I have prepared a round-up Perry's impressive statistical achievements.

    But numbers can't capture one important aspect of Perry's career—fun. I don't think there's another pop star whose music and videos convey such a sheer sense of fun as Perry's do—or who seems to be having as much fun being a pop star as Perry does.

    Read More »from Chart Watch Extra: Katy Perry, By The Numbers

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