Dominik Bindl/Getty Images Bruno Mars in February.Never doubt the selling power of a deep, well-publicized sale.
After being a steady presence among Billboard’s Top 10 albums for three months, Bruno Mars’s “Unorthodox Jukebox†(Atlantic) has finally reached No. 1, largely â€" but perhaps not entirely â€" because of a steep discount at Amazon’s MP3 store.
Last week Amazon put “Unorthodox Jukebox†and a handful of other titles on sale for $1.99 for one day, then raised the price for the rest of the week to $3.99 â€" still a steal. The album sold 95,000 cpies in the United States, nearly doubling its numbers from the week before, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and Mr. Mars got his first No. 1 album.
Amazon’s sale, promoted on the site and on its Twitter feed, undoubtedly helped the album reach the top, but according to the number-crunchers at Billboard it would have likely come close even without the discount. Of the album’s 95,000 sales last week, 64,000 were digital downloads, about three times its weekly average. If last week’s digital sales had held to the average level, “Unorthodox Jukebox†mi! ght have sold 48,000 or 49,000 copies â€" only slightly less than the No. 2 album this week, “Amok†(XL) by Atoms for Peace, the side project of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, which opened with 50,000 sales.
Mumford & Sons’ “Babel†(Glassnote), the No. 1 album for the last two weeks, fell to No. 3 this week with 43,000 sales, while Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s album “The Heist†(Macklemore) rose 12 spots to No. 4 with 42,000, helped by the Amazon promotion as well as the group’s performance on “Saturday Night Live.†(The continued popularity of the duo’s hit song, “Thrift Shop,†didn’t hurt: with 326,000 sales, it remains by far the most downloaded track.)
In fifth place on the album chart this week is “Zion†(Hillsong) by Hillsong United, a band affiliated with the Hillsong Church, a Pentecostal megachurch in Australia. The album sold 34,000 copies.
