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In its seventh week, Michael Bublé’s Christmas continued to utterly dominate the Billboard 200, increasing by 64 percent to 479,000 copies, topping the chart for a third straight week and lifting its U.S. total to a whopping 1,517,000.
Whether the crooner’s compilation was boosted by Bublé’s recent NBC special or the fact that people are just becoming more eager to hear Christmas music is unclear. What is certain, though, is that Bublé will finish 2011 with one of the best-selling albums of the year — in only two months’ time.
Josh Groban achieved a similar feat in 2007, when his holiday compilation Noël moved 3.6 million copies in eleven weeks, and became the best-selling title of all of 2007. Susan Boyle’s debut I Dreamed a Dream was only on the chart for the last six weeks of 2009, but it sold 3.1 million copies, enough to become the second-biggest album in the U.S. that year (behind Taylor Swift’s Fearless). The holidays can be major boon for gift-ready albums like Bublé’s.
In second place, garage-rock wunderkinds the Black Keys avoided any sophomore slump (alright, technically this is their seventh album, but it’s their second record since they broke into the mainstream in 2010) with El Camino, which shifted 206,000 discs in its first week. That number marks the duo’s best sales week by far, trumping the 73,000 debut of their last album Brothers.
Adele and Justin Bieber fill out the third and fourth place slots, respectively. Adele’s 21 experienced a nice 30 percent boost to 187,000, which officially pushed the British songstress’ collection past the 5 million mark. According to Yahoo’s Paul Grein, this is the first time an album has sold 5 million copies in one calendar year since Usher’s Confessions in 2004. Bieber’s Under the Mistletoe ticked up 19 percent to 153,000, bringing its total to 824,000. It could pass the platinum threshold next week.
Rounding out the top 5, Amy Winehouse’s posthumous release Lioness: Hidden Treasures started in fifth place, selling 114,000 copies. While far from Michael Jackson sales levels, that figure did beat out other debuts like Glee, the Music: Season 3, Volume 7 (No. 9, 58,000) and Korn’s The Path of Totality (No. 10, 55,000), as well as the Roots’ undun (no. 17) and Robin Thicke’s Love and War (No. 22).
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