Pop phenomenon Britney Spears proved her worth this week as her new single, ‘Hold It Against Me’, broke both airplay and digital sales records. However, while her excited fans swarmed iTunes to purchase copies of the track, similar enthusiasm wasn’t demonstrated buy album buyers. In fact, album sales have dipped to unbelievable new lows.
Spears’ ‘Hold It Against Me’ sold an astounding 411k downloads this week, easily positioning it at the #1 spot on the Digital Songs chart. This achievement has earned Spears the title of the female artist with the largest 1st week digital single sales, breaking Taylor Swift’s record of 325k downloads with ‘Today Was a Fairytale’.
On the contrary, sales were certainly far less impressive on the album charts where Alternative band Cake’s ‘Showroom of Compassion’ album debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 with a meager 44k copies sold. This means that the group has broken the record set by Swift’s ‘Speak Now’ LP just last week for having the lowest selling #1 album in the SoundScan era (since 1991).
Obviously, Urban artists didn’t manage to do any better this week than they did on the previous tally. Nicki Minaj’s ‘Pink Friday’ dipped 3 spots to #5 by selling 32k units (down 17%) whereas Rihanna’s ‘Loud’ fell from #6 to #8 with only 28k in sales (down 16%). Rounding out the top 10, Kanye West’s ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’ slided from #7 to #10, moving 25k (down 24%).