Album Sales | featured news

Justin Timberlake's comeback album has sold nearly 1 million units its first week out. Nielsen SoundScan announced Tuesday that the singer's third album, "The 20/20 Experience," has moved 968,000 units. It's the 19th album in Nielsen's 12-year history that has sold more than 900,000 albums in a single week.

Turns out Adele ruled 2012, too - and set a record while she was at it. The British singer's "21" was the highest-selling album in the U.S. for the second consecutive year, according to 2012 sales figures released by Nielsen SoundScan on Thursday. That's a first in the SoundScan era.

Taylor Swift’s “Red” appeared to be the music gift of choice among last-minute shoppers, posting a sixth week in the No. 1 slot in the final week before Christmas and adding another 276,000 copies to its total, which is closing in on 3 million.

Taylor Swift's "Red," released last Monday, is on track to sell more than one million copies in its first week in U.S. stores—the first album to do so since Ms. Swift's "Speak Now" album came out in 2010.

After a string of misfortunes -- a label change, poor reviews and a brawl with Drake -- Chris Brown's Fortune actually managed to top the Billboard 200. Brown's fifth studio album sold 134,000 copies in its first week, a significant drop from the 270,000 in debut-week sales of his previous album, 2011's F.A.M.E. Thanks to an 99 cent deal on Amazon, Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" re-entered the top 10 and climbed to No. 2.

Despite being released in January 2011, Adele's 21 is the only album that has sold more that one million copies this year.

Madonna‘s MDNA album debuts at number 1 on the British charts, but it’s a soft landing. According to Billboard, MDNA had sales of 56,000– very low for a number 1 album debut. In contrast, Bruce Springsteen‘s Wrecking Ball hit number 1 two weeks ago with 74,000 copies. Here in the US, Billboard is reporting–just as I did last week–that Lionel Richie is ahead of Madonna in the race for number 1. Those final numbers won’t be in until late Tuesday. But Richie is substantially ahead of Madonna on ITunes and amazon.com, the two chief sellers of music at this point.

U.S. album sales rose more than 3 percent last year for the first gain since 2004 — a sign that rising digital sales are finally stemming the decade-long decline of compact discs. The uptick to 458 million album sales was helped by the hugely popular sophomore album "21" from British singer Adele, which sold 5.8 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Huge interest in Adele also led to the sales of 856,000 copies of "19," her debut album from 2008.

Amy Winehouse is still hitting music milestones after her untimely death last month. Britain's Official Charts Company says Winehouse's Grammy-award winning "Back to Black" has become the best-selling album in the U.K. in the 21st century.

Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" sold 1.11 million copies its first week in North America, giving the pop singer the largest sales week since 2005.