2007's last album sales week offers glimmer of hope

By Geoff Mayfield

LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - The Queen of Hip-Hop Soul adds another jewel to her crown, as Mary J. Blige captures her fourth career No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

Blige ends up ruling the chart in the only week of 2007 when album sales beat those of the same week in the prior year.

With Santa Claus finishing his rounds early in the tracking week, momentum finally slows for Josh Groban's "Noel," which had a lock on the top slot for five weeks. That shift sets the stage for Blige's "Growing Pains" to take command of the big chart a week after it bowed at No. 1 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Albums.

Groban's Christmas set declines by 77 percent, the first time since its second chart week that "Noel" does not log a gain. That rolls him down to No. 3 (176,000 copies); a smaller erosion of 67 percent from Blige's opening sales moves her to first place (204,000).

The post-Christmas decline by Alicia Keys' "As I Am" is less severe than either Groban's or Blige's, shuffling her back to No. 2 (down 59 percent, 193,000).

Coming off the busiest shopping week of the year in the week that ended December 23, there is no shame in a post-Christmas slide. Only two titles in the Billboard 200's top 50 manage any kind of increase: the film-fueled soundtrack to "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" (56-23, up 5 percent) and Greatest Gainer winner Sara Bareilles (98-45, up 19 percent).

Including chart bows, there are 15 gainers on the Billboard 200, which is actually more than the chart has produced in some post-Christmas frames of years gone by.

Three of those gains belong to albums new to the list: Disney Channel variant "High School Musical 2: Non-Stop Dance Party" (No. 68, 22,000 copies), the "P.S. I Love You" soundtrack (No. 134, 10,000) and the physical release of Radiohead's "In Rainbows," which charts early due to street-date violations (No. 156, 9,000).

Among those 15 gainers are seven albums that re-enter the Billboard 200 (at Nos. 123, 168, 170, 182, 184, 191 and 196), a couple of them with increases of fewer than 100 units.

Meanwhile, with a Tuesday Christmas adding one more last-minute gift-shopping day than we had in the comparable frame of 2006, the last week of 2007 manages to be the only one of the year where album sales show an uptick over the same week of the prior year. Aside from gift shopping, the growth is fed by album downloads gobbled up by consumers who found MP3 players under their Christmas trees.

Under most circumstances, a 2.4 percent improvement in comparable-week sales would seem meager, but in the landscape of 2007, that bump looms as large as Mount Rushmore.

Reuters/Billboard