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Add the andPOP Facebook Application - (Yahoo!) - For most artists, moving almost 1.6 million copies of an album in one week would be cause for celebration.
But the Backstreet Boys aren't most artists.
According to sales figures released by SoundScan on Wednesday (November 29), the Boys will debut at #1 on next week's Billboard 200 albums chart, after selling more than 1.59 million copies of their Back & Blue ? an astonishing number by most standards.
However, many looked to the group to surpass fellow teen popsters *NSync, who set a one-week record by selling more than 2.4 million copies of their No Strings Attached in March. *NSync shattered the previous record of 1.13 million, which was set by the Backstreet Boys' Millennium in May 1999.
Black & Blue landed at #3 on the list of the biggest one-week sellers, behind *NSync and Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP, which sold more than 1.76 million copies in its first week in stores in May.
While they fell short of the U.S. one-week sales record, the Boys are contenting themselves with global first-week sales of more than 5 million for the album, which the group claims is a record. The group also announced via a press release that the U.S. figures make the Boys the first artists in the SoundScan era to score million-plus first-week sales with back-to-back albums.
The arrival of Black & Blue sends The Beatles 1 ? the collection of #1 Beatles singles that was the previous week's #1 selling album ? down to #2. The compilation Now That's What I Call Music ? Vol. 5 also slipped a notch, from #2 to #3.
Beyond the battle for boy band supremacy, country star Tim McGraw boasts the week's next highest debut. McGraw's Greatest Hits sold more than 306,000 copies to arrive at #4 on next week's chart.
Nipping at McGraw's heels is the latest from the Wu-Tang Clan. The New York rappers' W sold more than 301,000 copies to debut at #5. Releases from Sade, R. Kelly, Outkast, Limp Bizkit and Ricky Martin round out the top 10.
Soul singer and hip-hop earth mother Erykah Badu cracked the top 20 with her latest, Mama's Gun. Badu sold more than 190,000 of the album to debut at 11.
The rest of the top 50 includes debuts from rapper B.G. at #21 with Checkmate, new age songstress Enya at #23 with Day Without Rain, hip-hop duo Capone-N-Noreaga at #31 with Reunion, rappers 8ball and MJG at #39 with Space Age 4 Eva and R&B vocalist Dave Hollister at #49 with Chicago '85 ... The Movie.
New releases from Everclear at #66, Nine Inch Nails at #67, Christian star Michael W. Smith at #70, pop legend Elton John at #75, hip-hop-minded Christians DC Talk at #81 and the late Tupac Shakur at #89 help to round out the top 100.
The bottom half of next week's top 200 will include debuts from Snoop Dogg's Doggy's Angels at #138, late guitar great Stevie Ray Vaughan at #148, Oasis at #182 and the group's longtime foil, Blur, at #186.
