On the Charts: Taylor Swift Joins Whitney Houston in Elite Number One Club
Taylor Swift made chart history on the Billboard 200 as her 1989 grabbed Number One for a 10th non-consecutive week, putting the “Blank Space” singer in an elite company of artists who have placed multiple albums at Number One for over 10 weeks. Swift previously achieved double-digits at the top spot when her 2008 LP Fearless reigned the charts for 11 weeks.
Swift joins only Whitney Houston among female artists who have achieved that feat. Houston did it three times: First with her 1986 self-titled debut album (14 weeks at Number One), then 1987’s Whitney (11 weeks) and finally her soundtrack to The Bodyguard (a whopping 20 weeks in the top spot over 1992 and 1993).
According to Billboard, Swift and Houston are among only seven acts overall who have managed to chart multiple albums at Number One for over 10 weeks: The Beatles did it four times, Elvis Presley and the Kingston Trio achieved it three times, and Henry Mancini and the Monkees both accomplished it twice.
However, Swift’s feat comes at the expense of the rest of the Top 10, as no albums managed to climb over the 100,000 sales threshold. In fact, the 71,000 1989s sold in pure albums sales last week mark the lowest total a Number One album have moved since Sia’s 1000 Forms of Fear topped the charts last July with a 52,000 sales week, Billboard writes.
Only one new album managed to infiltrate the Top 10: Ne-Yo’s Non-Fiction, which racked up 59,000 copies to land at Number Five, one spot ahead of last week’s Number One, Fall Out Boy’s American Beauty/American Psycho.
Meanwhile, Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” with Bruno Mars continues to dominate the Singles chart, chalking up another 365,000 downloads last week alone. The strength of the single helped propel Ronson’s Uptown Special from Number 10 last week to Number Seven, although 75 percent of those sales are accumulated from Billboard’s Tracks Equivalent Album (TEAs) metric. That new metric means that all those “Uptown Funk” downloads are bundled together and counted toward Uptown Special sales.