Swift Holds On to Top Spot in a Big Week for Music Sales

Taylor Swift held on to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart for a sixth week, beating releases by T.I. and Bruno Mars, as well as the “12-12-12” charity album, in one of the biggest sales weeks of the year for the music industry.

Ms. Swift's “Red” (Big Machine) sold 276,000 copies in the week that ended Sunday, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the period when most - but not all - last-minute holiday shopping took place. She may also get a boost in next week's chart, which will include Christmas Day, a big day for music sales as people cash in gift certificates from online stores like iTunes and Amazon. If sales of “Red” stay strong, the album could cross the three million mark next week.

The rapper T.I. opened at No. 2 with 179,000 sales of his new album, “Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head” (Atlantic), beating the No. 3 record, Bruno Mars's “Unorthodox Jukebox” (Atlantic), by fewer than 2,000 copies. Close by at No. 4 is One Direction's “Take Me Home” (Syco/Columbia), with 177,000 sales. (SoundScan's publicly reported sales numbers are rounded to the nearest thousand.) The fifth most popular album was Michael Bublé's “Christmas” (Warner Brothers), with 148,000 copies sold.

The most surprising showing on this week's chart, however, is “12-12-12: The Concert for Sandy” (Columbia), a compilation of 24 tracks from the all-star benefit concert at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 12. Although the concert was broadcast on many television channels, radio stations and Web sites, and had been predicted to sell up to 150,000 copies, according to Billboard, it sold only 82,000.

One reason for the relative lack of interest might be the album's track list. Although it fea tures the likes of the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, it omits Kanye West, one of the few non-baby boomer acts on the bill. It also lacks perhaps the most talked-about moment of the show, Mr. McCartney's performance with surviving members of Nirvana in a song called “Cut Me Some Slack”; instead, a studio version of that song is on sale as part of the soundtrack to “Sound City,” a forthcoming film directed by Nirvana's Dave Grohl.