Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters Selena Gomez performing on “Good Morning America.â€After five weeks of rap albums topping the Billboard charts, it’s back to pop. Selena Gomez, who made her name as part of Disney’s fold of singing, smiling teens, has scored her first No. 1 album with “Stars Dance†(Hollywood). The album, her fourth, sold 97,000 copies last week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and Billboard notes that Ms. Gomez, now 21, enjoys a distinction that is getting rarer: each of her last three albums has opened with more sales than the one before it.
Meanwhile, the British boy band One Direction has the biggest-selling new single, “Best Song Ever†â€" a teaser for both a new film and the group’s next album â€" which opened with 322,000 downloads. But it was held at No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, which incorporates streaming and radio play in addition to sales. Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,†still huge on the radio and streaming services, holds at No. 1 on the Hot 100 for an eighth week.
The top-selling album for the last two weeks, Jay Z’s “Magna Carta … Holy Grail†(Roc-A-Fella/Universal), fell to No. 2 with 77,000 sales. The soundtrack to “Teen Beach Movie,†another Disney property, rose five spots to No. 3 with 57,000.
Also on the album chart, the 24th installment in the “Kidz Bop†series, released by Razor & Tie, with romper-room-friendly versions of hits by Justin Timberlake, Icona Pop and Pitbull, fell one spot to No. 4 with 39,000. Marc Anthony’s new album in Spanish, “Marc Anthony 3.0†(Sony), opened at No. 5 with slightly fewer than 39,000 sales. (SoundScan’s publicly reported numbers are rounded.)
