Meghan Trainor steals Swift's spot atop Billboard album chart

[January 22, 2015]  LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Pop singer Meghan Trainor's debut album "Title" knocked Taylor Swift from her three-week perch atop the weekly Billboard album chart on Wednesday.

"Title," which has been buoyed by Trainor's No. 1 single "All About That Bass" and follow-up hit "Lips Are Movin," sold 195,000 albums, 377,000 song downloads and nearly 8 million streams, according to figures compiled by Nielsen SoundScan.

Under the revamped Billboard chart, that counted for 238,000 total sales units, besting the 131,000 in sales for Swift's "1989," which dropped to No. 2 on the chart. "1989" has been the top album for nine of its 12 weeks in release.

Trainor's debut - an expansion on her 2014 EP of the same name - comes three weeks ahead of the Grammy Awards where the 21-year-old singer-songwriter is nominated for song and record of the year for "All About That Bass," a 1960s-inflected pop song about female body types.

The song spent eight consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 song chart last year.

Other new releases in the top 10 include "Kidz Bop 27," a collection of pop hits sung by children, at No. 3 and pop producer Mark Ronson's "Uptown Special" at No. 5.

Ronson and singer Bruno Mars' hit "Uptown Funk!" was the top downloaded song on the digital songs chart for the third consecutive week with 400,000 in sales, a rise of 60,000 downloads from last week.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Alan Crosby)

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