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Taking a page from Beyonce's book, Drake released his album on
iTunes last Friday with no advance warning and debuted with
535,000 sales units - 495,000 of which were albums, according to
figures from Nielsen SoundScan for the week ending Feb. 15.
It was Drake's fourth No. 1 debuting album. Overall album sales
for the week were the second largest in the last year, only
behind industry-wide sales in the debut week of Swift's "1989,"
Billboard said.
The soundtrack "Fifty Shades of Grey" came in at No. 2 with
258,000 units sold after the book-inspired sex fantasy broke box
office records in its debut weekend.
Sam Smith, the big winner from the Feb. 8 Grammy Awards,
received a 91 percent Grammy sales boost from the previous week
to 164,000 sales units, including 15 million streaming hits.
Fellow British singer and Grammy nominee Ed Sheeran's "X" saw a
44 percent rise in sales after the Grammys but fell from third
to fourth place.
Their good performances pushed Swift to her lowest spot on the
chart since "1989" debuted 16 weeks ago. Her sales went up 16
percent to 125,000 units, but unlike the others ahead of her,
she has no streaming sales since she famously pulled her
material off that platform last year. Every week since release,
"1989" has claimed one of the top two spots.
The reformulated Billboard 200 considers album sales, song
downloads and online streaming to compile an album's total sales
units.
Los Angeles rocker "Beck," the surprise winner of the best album
Grammy for "Morning Phase,' moved up to No. 8 from No. 39.
Sheeran's "Thinking Out Loud" bumped singer Bruno Mars and
producer Mark Ronson's hit "Uptown Funk!" from the top of the
downloaded song chart after six weeks holding that spot.
Sheeran's song showed a 17 percent increase in downloads to
314,000.
(Reporting by Mary Milliken; Editing by Eric Kelsey and David
Gregorio)
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