Taylor Swift's Red Headed For Seventh Week On Top Of Billboard 200
Posted by Joseph Lee on 12.28.2012
Nothing can stop it...
Billboard reports that Taylor Swift's Red is set to take a seventh non-consecutive week on top of the Billboard 200 next week.
However, it's hard to predict how much the album will sell due to sales for all albums and songs being unstable due to Christmas Day shopping. Still, Red could end up selling 225,000 or more. This is helped by Amazon MP3 having the album on sale for $1.99 on Christmas Eve. Red's sales at Amazon MP3 will account from 23-30% of its sales this week. (The discounted sales will count because the album has been out for over four weeks; Billboard doesn't count sales of albums priced below $3.49 during the first four weeks of release.)
In the past week, Red sold 276,000 copies. The new Billboard 200 will be revealed on Thursday, January 3 instead of Wednesday because the New Year's holiday falling on Soundscan's normal processing day of Tuesday.
If Red is #1, it will be the 24th week Swift has been on top in her career. Fearless spent 11 weeks on top and 2010's Speak Now had six weeks on top. Swift will tie Adele as the woman with the most weeks at #1 since May of 1991 when SoundScan began providing sales data. Of course, all of Adele's weeks came from one single album, 21.
There are no real big albums vying for the top spot next week, although both Bruno Mars' Unorthodox Jukebox and One Direction's Take Me Home could end up in the top five. The Les Miserables soundtrack debuted at #33 last week with 43,000 after only three days of sales. It could jump into the top ten after the film opened on Christmas Day.
