'Glee' and 'Twilight' Crush Aguilera on Charts

A pair of soundtracks spoiled Christina Aguilera's hopes of scoring the top slot on this week's charts. Glee: The Music, Journey to Regionals EP and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse debuted at Number One and Two, respectively, on the Billboard 200 chart. Aguilera's Bionic, the pop star's first album in four years, had to settle for third place with 110,000 copies sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Aguilera's sales week marks the first time in her career that she failed to debut a new studio album within the top two spots. Bionic sold less than a third of 2006's Back to Basics, which moved 346,000 copies its first week.

Journey to Regionals, which sold 152,000 copies, is the third consecutive Glee album to climb to the top of the charts, following the release of The Power of Madonna and Volume 3: Showstoppers earlier this year. As Billboard notes, Glee is the first TV program to log three chart toppers in one year since the Monkees in 1967. Despite exclusive songs by Muse, the Dead Weather, Vampire Weekend and others, Twilight settled into the Number Two spot with 144,000 copies. The previous Twilight soundtrack debuted at Number One last year.

In total, six new releases made it into the Top 10: Plies's Goon Affiliated finished the week at Number Five with 56,000, Dierks Bentley's Up on the Ridge opened at Number Nine and Jewel's Sweet and Wild came in at Number 10. Last week's Number One album, Jack Johnson's To The Sea, dropped to Number Four but still managed to sell 89,000 in its second week on shelves.

This time next week, we'll find out if the summer's most anticipated hip-hop album, Drake's Thank Me Later, can score the biggest sales week of 2010. Currently, Sade's Soldier of Love is the title-holder with 502,000 copies, but with Thank Me Later expected to move units somewhere in the half-million territory, Drake could make a claim for the 2010 crown.

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Song Stories

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell | 1974

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.

More Song Stories entries »

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