malayala manorama news paper: Adele's 21 Ties Whitney Houston Chart Record

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Adele's 21 Ties Whitney Houston Chart Record

Houston's Greatest Hits re-enters Billboard albums chart at #6 with only one day of sales after her death.
By Gil Kaufman

Adele
Photo: Andreas Rentz/ Getty Images

Grammy queen Adele will celebrate a career landmark next week when her Album of the Year-winning 21 matches a Billboard 200 chart record. The excitement will come with a tinge of sadness, though, as the remarkable 20th nonconsecutive week at #1 matches the high-water mark set by Whitney Houston's "Bodyguard" soundtrack in 1992-93.

In a tragic coincidence, Adele matched that mark in the same week that the "I Will Always Love You" singer was found dead Saturday at age 48 in her Los Angeles hotel room. The death came less than 24 hours before Adele scooped up six Grammys for 21, which will mark a full year on the charts during the next reporting cycle. Adele reached that mark with sales of 237,000 copies of her album, a 95 percent increase over the previous week, according to figures provided by Nielsen SoundScan. The increase pushed the album past the 6.6 million mark in total sales, and experts predict that sales could double yet again next week in the wake of the Grammy triumph.

There were plenty of other new faces in the almost all-new top 10, including reunited rock icons Van Halen, whose comeback album with original lead singer David Lee Roth, A Different Kind of Truth, will come in at #2 on sales of 187,000. Right behind was Now That's What I Call Music! 41 (#3, 142,000), followed by Scars & Stories by The Fray, Paul McCartney's covers album Kisses From the Bottom (#5, 74,000) and Houston's resurgent Whitney: The Greatest Hits, which hit #6 thanks to sales of 64,000 in just one day of post-death sales for the reporting week that ended Sunday. The uptick represents a 10,419 percent gain over the previous week, when it moved just 1,000 copies.

Country star Dierks Bentley debuted at #7 with Home (55,000) and the 2012 Grammy Nominees album was at #8 (51,000). Adele's debut, 19, jumped up 10 places to #9 as sales increased 103 percent to 36,000, and Drake's Take Care rounded out the top 10 with sales of 32,000.

Though the true Grammy bump won't hit until next week, show performers Coldplay got an early boost, with sales of Mylo Xyloto up 105 percent to 28,000 as the album moved 14 spots to #14. It was a harsh second-week comedown for polarizing pinup crooner Lana Del Rey, though, as her debut, Born to Die, suffered a 62 percent drop, plunging 11 spots to #13 on sales of 29,000.

Tune in as we celebrate the life of an icon with "Whitney Houston: In Her Own Words" tonight at 7:30 p.m. ET on MTV.

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