The Big News: A full week on shelves and digital music services helped propel the Twilight Saga: New Moon soundtrack to the Number One position on the Billboard Top 200 with another 153,000 copies sold according to Nielsen SoundScan — a 33 percent increase over its truncated debut sales week. The soundtrack’s predecessor also topped the charts last year. Tim McGraw’s Southern Voice debuted at Number Two and Michael Buble’s Crazy Love dropped to Number Three after a two-week reign atop the charts, selling another 102,000.
By current estimates, however, New Moon’s tenure at Number One will be short-lived as another soundtrack is poised to take its place: According to Reuters, Michael Jackson’s This Is It is expected to sell between 300,000 to 350,000 copies, giving the King of Pop his sixth Number One album on the Top 200 and his first since 2001’s Invincible. Jackson’s 2003 greatest hits comp Number Ones is the year’s bestselling album with 2.2 million copies, but it was ineligible for the Top 200 when it was leading the pack in sales following Jackson’s June 25th death.
Debuts: Three other new albums managed to impact the Top 20: Joss Stone’s Colour Me Free at 10 with 27,000 copies, Rammstein’s Liebe ist für alle da at 13 and Flight of the Conchords’ I Told You I Was Freaky at 19. For Stone, Colour’s numbers pale in comparison to her previous album Introducing Joss Stone, which debuted at Number Two with 118,000 copies in April 2008.
Last Week’s Heroes: We must be creeping up on holiday season because the majority of last week’s Top 10 only suffered minimal sale decreases (or increases in the case of Taylor Swift and Owl City). The Flaming Lips experienced the biggest stumble as Embryonic dropped from Number Eight down to 51. Mario’s D.N.A. tagged ...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily