Britney Spears
Britney Spears Makes History. This week Britney becomes the first female solo artist in the history of Billboard’s pop album chart to amass six #1 albums before her 30th birthday. Spears, 29, achieves the feat with her new album, Femme Fatale, which enters the chart at #1. Until this week, Mariah Carey was the youngest female solo artist to gather six #1 albums. She was 38 when she picked up her sixth #1 album, E=MC2, in 2008..
Femme Fatale sold 276,000 copies in its first week, which is the second biggest one-week total so far in 2011. Only Adele’s 21 sold more copies in one week (352,000). That said, this is the thinnest first-week total for a Spears studio album since her debut album, ….Baby One More Time, sold 121K in its first week in January 1999..
Femme Fatale (great title) sold far fewer copies in its first week than Spears’ last album, Circus, which sold 505K copies in December 2008. But it sold nearly as many digital copies (113K for this album, compared to 118K for Circus), which means digital sales accounted for a much higher percentage this time out..
Britney Spears
Five songs from Britney Spear’s Femme Fatale are listed on Hot Digital Songs, but “Hold It Against Me” isn’t among them. How can that be? (The smash, which reached #1 on both the Hot 100 and Hot Digital Songs, was #66 on the digital chart last week.) It’s the impact of returns due to customers’ “Complete My Album” option. Enough fans took advantage of that clever gimmick that the song showed negative sales this week. (Whoever came up with that idea deserves a raise.).
In June 2010, Britney Spears was ranked sixth on Forbes list of the 100 Most Powerful and Influential celebrities in the world; she is also the third most mentioned musician on the internet, according to Forbes. She is listed by the Guinness World Records as having the “Best-selling album by a teenage solo artist” for her debut album …Baby One More Time which sold over thirteen million copies in the United States. Melissa Ruggieri of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, “Britney Spears is also marked for being the best-selling teenage artist. Before she turned 20 in 2001, Spears sold more than 37 million albums worldwide”.
