Taylor Swift has topped the Billboard album chart once again, with her album “Red†(Big Machine) holding at No. 1 for a fifth week with 208,000 sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The new album by Bruno Mars, “Unorthodox Jukebox†(Atlantic), also did well, opening at No. 2 with 192,000.
Reed Saxon/Associated Press Jenni Rivera in March.But the most remarkable performance on this week's chart is by Jenni Rivera, the Mexican-American singer and television star who died in a plane crash in Mexico on Dec. 9. Her mourning fans - and perhaps some newcomers whose cu riosity was piqued by news coverage of her death - bought 64,000 of her albums in the United States, more than 10 times the 6,000 sold the week before. She also sold 85,000 digital tracks, seven times the 12,000 she sold the week before. A compilation album released just two days after Ms. Rivera died, “La Misma Gran Señora†(Fonovisa), scored highest, reaching No. 38 on Billboard's over all album list, and she takes the top three slots on Billboard's Latin chart.
In the days after her death, Ms. Rivera's songs also became much more popular among radio programmers. According to BDS, another division of Nielsen that tracks radio playlists, American stations played her songs at least 14,700 times last week, almost five times her average over the three previous weeks. Such sales and airplay spikes are common after a big star die s, as with Michael Jackson in 2009 and Whitney Houston earlier this year. But they are all the more notable in the case of Ms. Rivera, who had a big following among Hispanics but was little-known to many Americans.
Also on the chart this week, the British boy band One Direction holds strong at No. 4 with 127,000 sales of “Take Me Home†(Syco/Columbia), bringing its eight-week sales total to slightly more than 1 million; the Game, the Los Angeles gangsta rapper, reached No. 6 with his latest, “Jesus Piece†(DGC/Interscope), which had 86,000 sales. To no one's surprise, a slew of holiday albums by well-known acts also scored well: Michael Bublé (No. 3), Rod Stewart (No. 5), Blake Shelton (No. 7) and Lady Antebellum (No. 10).
