Daughtry's sophomore album, Leave This Town, enters The Billboard 200 at #1. This makes the band's leader, Chris Daughtry, the first American Idol alumnus to land back-to-back #1 albums. Daughtry rang the bell for two weeks in early 2007. Kelly Clarkson is the only other Idol alum to notch two #1 albums, and hers weren't consecutive. She topped the chart with her first and fourth albums. This obviously makes Chris Daughtry the first Idol alum who didn't win the competition to land two #1 albums. (Clay Aiken is the only other non-winner to land a #1 album, though Adam Lambert is likely to join this little club.)
Leave This Town is Daughtry's first album to debut in the top spot. Daughtry bowed at #2 in November 2006. It first hit #1 in its ninth week. Daughtry has sold 4,494,000 copies. Of the thousands of albums that have been released in the nearly three years since Daughtry, only one other (Josh Groban's Noel) has reached the 4 million mark in sales. (Taylor Swift, which has also topped the 4 million mark, was released a month before Daughtry.)
Leave This Town sold 269,000 copies in its first week, a little less than Daughtry, which had first-week sales of 304,000. (The softening of music sales in the past three years easily accounts for the difference.) It's common for debut albums by Idol alums to open with big numbers. The real test is how their second albums open. Only one sophomore album by an Idol album started with a bigger tally than Daughtry managed this week. Carrie Underwood's Carnival Ride debuted with sales of 527,000 in October 2007. (Kelly Clarkson's sophomore album, Breakaway, opened with sales of 250,000 in December 2004. Clay Aiken's A Thousand Different Ways started with 211,000 in September 2006.)
The total for Daughtry's album includes nearly 63,000 digital copies. That makes it the week's #1 Digital Album. Daughtry was also #1 on this chart in its first week of release, though with a much smaller total (12,000), which dramatizes the growth in this field in the past three years.
Michael Jackson has six of the 10 best-selling albums in the U.S. for the second week in a row. Number Ones sold 192,000 copies and would have slipped from #1 to #2 on The Billboard 200 if catalog albums were eligible to make the big chart. The Essential Michael Jackson sold 125,000 and would have inched up from #4 to #3. Thriller sold 114,000 and would have slipped from #3 to #4. Off The Wall sold 68,000 and would have slipped from #6 to #8. Bad sold 61,000 and would have slipped from #8 to #9. Dangerous sold 55,000 and would have dipped from #9 to #10.
Jackson's incredible showing the past two weeks breaks a record that had stood for 43 years, since April 1966 when Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass put four albums in the top 10. It's not the first time that these two artists have tangled. In October 1979, Alpert's instrumental smash "Rise" booted Jackson's "Don't Stop ‘Til You Get Enough" out of the #1 spot on the Hot 100. There is, of course, another Alpert/Jackson tie-in: Janet Jackson was featured on Alpert's "Diamonds," a top five hit in 1987.
Number Ones has sold 1,104,000 copies in the U.S. in 2009, which puts it #4 for the year-to-date. Where will it rank on the year-end chart? Place your bets.
Jackson has sold nearly 3 million albums in less than a month. Four weeks ago, on the last chart before Jackson's death, the pop icon ranked #47 on Nielsen/SoundScan's running list of the best-selling album artists in its history, with sales of 21,737,000 albums. This week, he ranks #37, with sales of 24,724,000. That's a huge increase in just four weeks' time, on a chart that measures 18 years of sales activity.
A total of 27 songs that feature Jackson are listed on Hot Digital Songs, down from 46 last week. Jackson had a staggering 50 of the top 200 three weeks ago. (The Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" tops that chart for the sixth straight week. The smash sold 219,000 downloads this week. This is the 16th week in a row that the Peas have headed that chart with a song that sold at least 200K in paid downloads.)
While Jackson no longer has the best-selling album in the U.S., he is on top in Japan and the U.K., which are the world's #2 and #3 music markets. King Of Pop (Japan Edition) jumps from #3 to #1 in Japan. This is the second time in a little more than two months that a retrospective by or featuring a deceased American pop star has hit the top spot in Japan. Carpenters' 40/40 The Best Selection rang the bell there in May. Jackson has five of the top 10 albums in the U.K. (counting a Jackson 5 collection). The Essential Michael Jackson is #1 there for the third straight week.
I'll have more on the simmering catalog chart controversy at the end of this week's column, but first let's look at the rest of this week's action.
Taylor Swift's Fearless logs its 30th week in the top 10, which ties Carrie Underwood's 2005 album Some Hearts for the recent country record. The last country album to have a longer run in the top 10 was Shania Twain's Come On Over, which logged 53 weeks in the top 10 from 1997 to 1999. Fearless has sold 3,537,000 copies, a real achievement given the state of the economy and music sales in particular. Fearless also returns to #1 on the Country Albums chart for the first time in nearly four months. This is its 19th week atop that list.
Jack White, the leader of the White Stripes, returns to the top 10 with his new group, The Dead Weather. The group's album Horehound enters The Billboard 200 at #6. This is White's sixth top 10 album, following three albums with the Stripes and two with the Raconteurs. It's very unusual for an artist to reach the top 10 as often with side projects as with his primary group. The Dead Weather also features Alison Mosshart of the Kills; Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age; and Jack Lawrence of the Raconteurs and the Greenhornes.
You've heard the expression, "Slow but steady wins the race?" That's certainly true of Kings of Leon's Only By The Night. The album returns to the top 10 this week for the first time since it debuted at #5 in September. The album dropped as low as #78 in December, before beginning a remarkable rebound. It has ranked in the top 20 for all but one of the last 13 weeks. The album is about two weeks away from topping the 1 million mark in sales. (It currently stands at 959,000.) These guys will have earned those platinum records.
Here's the low-down on this week's top 10 albums.
1. Daughtry, Leave This Town, 269,000. This new entry is Daughtry's second #1 album in a row. Three songs from the album are listed on Hot Digital Songs, topped by "No Surprise," which vaults from #59 to #24.