On the Charts: Justin Bieber’s ‘Purpose’ Crushes One Direction
In the final sales week before Adele‘s 25 puts an indefinite stranglehold on the Billboard 200’s Number One spot, Justin Bieber‘s Purpose proved victorious in its much-ballyhooed competition against One Direction‘s Made in the A.M. Despite predictions that it would be a close race for the top spot, Bieber’s first studio album in over three years grabbed Number One with relative ease after Purpose sold 649,000 total copies in its first week, giving the album the temporary crown of 2015’s highest-selling week until Adele claims that honor seven days from now, Billboard reports.
Purpose marked Bieber’s sixth consecutive Number One album. Of Purpose‘s 649,000 copies sold, 522,000 units came from pure album sales, with the rest of that total coming from a combination of a la carte song downloads and streaming figures. Still, it was more than enough to topple One Direction, whose first album as a quartet claimed the Number Two spot with 459,000 total copies sold, 402,000 of which were pure album sales. In what’s some good pre-Black Friday news for the music industry, this week marked the first time since December 2009 that the Number One and Two albums both sold more than 400,000 copies apiece.
As the holiday season approaches, a bunch of new releases flooded shelves, resulting in a vastly different Top 10 than previous weeks. In fact, eight of this week’s Top 10 were new releases: After Bieber and One Direction, Logic’s The Incredible True Story grabbed Number Three, followed by Jeezy’s Church in These Streets (Number Four), Chris Young’s I’m Comin’ Over (Number Five) and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s latest set Letters From the Labyrinth (Number Seven).
Alessia Cara’s Know It All and Kirk Franklin’s Losing My Religion, at Nine and 10 respectively, rounded out the debuts in the Top 10. The only remnants from last week’s Top 10 were Chris Stapleton’s Traveller at Number Six and the Weeknd’s Beauty Behind the Madness at Number Eight.
Next week, we’ll find out just how many records Adele’s 25 breaks on her way to Number One; early forecasts predict the album will smash the single-week sales record currently held by N’Sync’s No Strings Attached, which sold 2.4 million when it arrived in March 2000.