The music industry rule of thumb used to be that in order for a holiday release not to get lost amidst the shopping rush, new titles had to be in stores by early December. Well, for the second year in a row, rapper DMX has smashed that theory to bits. His latest, And Then There Was X, didn't arrive in stores until Dec. 21, but it promptly sold 698,000 copies, according to SoundScan, making it the second biggest debut of the year, behind only the Backstreet Boys' Millennium, which sold 1.1 million copies out of the gate last spring.

So for the week ending Dec. 26, DMX has the country's best-selling album. (Last year, DMX's Flesh of My Flesh; Blood of My Blood popped right before Christmas and sold 670,000 copies.)

To date though, it's only been rap stars who've been willing to roll the dice with late-December releases. 2Pac's latest posthumous effort, Still I Rise, came in at No. 4, while Goodie Mob's World Party debuted at No. 56. And DMX's reign may be short-lived because rapper Jay-Z's latest debuts on next week's chart and it's expected to come in at the top slot.

Nonetheless, what a week it was in record shops, as last-minute holiday shoppers were apparently buying by the fistful. The country's top fifty-three albums all sold in excess of 100,000 copies, while the top twenty titles all sold at least 250,000 units. Those sort of eye-popping numbers explain why the fourth quarter has always been such an attractive time to release superstar records; they can go gold or platinum in just a matter of days.

Among the biggest winners was Santana's Supernatural, which sold 528,000 copies. That's up a whopping 130,000 units from the previous week. Others who saw especially large seven-day gains were the Dixie Chicks' Fly (+63,000); Kid Rock's Devil Without a Cause (+56,000); Andrea Bocelli's Sacred Arias (+51,000); Limp Bizkit's Significant Other (+48,000); and Blink 182's Enema of the State (+42,000).

From the top, it was DMX's And Then There Was X, followed by Celine Dion's All the Way: A Decade in Song (selling 640,000 copies); the Backstreet Boys' Millennium (562,000); Santana's Supernatural (527,000); Christina Aguilera Christina Aguilera (503,000); Britney Spears' ...Baby One More Time (480,000); 2Pac + Outlawz's Still I Rise (408,000); Kenny G's Faith: A Holiday Album (397,000); Mariah Carey's Rainbow (368,000); and Shania Twain's Come On Over (355,000).

ERIC BOEHLERT
(December 29, 1999)