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Taylor Swift

Not even Foo Fighters or Garth can unseat Taylor Swift

Brian Mansfield
USA TODAY
Taylor Swift Performs On ABC's "Good Morning America" at Times Square on October 30, 2014, in New York City.

Neither Foo Fighters nor Pink Floyd, not even Garth Brooks, were able to keep Taylor Swift from a third week atop the Billboard albums chart.

Swift sold 312,000 copies of 1989, bringing her three-week sales total for the album to 2 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Swift also had the week's top-selling track, as single Blank Space sold 328,000 downloads, double the number of the week before. Those sales helped push Blank Space to the top spot on Billboard's Hot 100 chart, where it replaced Shake It Off, making Swift the first woman during the chart's 56 years to succeed herself at No. 1.

"It's good to be Taylor Swift," says Keith Caulfield, Billboard's associate editor of charts/sales. "She's a superstar, everything's working for her, and she's doing everything right."

Foo Fighters, whose Sonic Highways has been promoted with an HBO documentary series and a week-long residency on theLate Show with David Letterman, among other things, debuted at No. 2, selling 190,000 copies of the album.

Two acts who hadn't released new studio albums in years — Pink Floyd and Garth Brooks — debuted in the Nos. 3 and 4 spots, respectively. Pink Floyd's The Endless River, based on material the band started recording in 1993 and the group's first album since keyboardist Richard Wright's 2008 death, sold 170,000 copies.

Brooks, the best-selling solo act in U.S. history, sold 130,000 copies of Man Against Machine, his first album of new material since 2001.

"It's hard to look at his number in a vacuum," Caulfield says. "This is his first studio album in 13 years. He removed himself from the music landscape for a very long time.

"Garth has to do some rebuilding. He wasn't on social networks until a week or two ago. He's not on most digital services. You have to take those things into account."

Brooks' budget-priced, WalMart exclusive, eight-disc box set, Blame It All on My Roots: Five Decades of Influences, sold 164,000 in its first week last year. In 1998, Brooks became first act of the SoundScan era to sell a million copies of an album in a week, moving 1.085 million copies of his Double Live. (The multi-artist soundtrack for The Bodyguard sold 1.06 million in 1992.)

The way Brooks chose to sell Man Against Machine likely had an impact on its numbers, initially projected to be in the 250,000-to-300,000 range. Brooks refused to license the album to iTunes, selling it digitally only through his website and GhostTunes, a new digital music service he helped launch. He made the album available individually, on CD and as a download, but fans also had the option of purchasing it as part of a $29.99 digital bundle that included most of his back catalog and a pre-order of his next album. GhostTunes has not reported digital sales of the album to SoundScan.

"When country radio isn't playing your new music, when you've been off most social networks and you're not on digital retail services, you've got to do everything you can to get the word out," Caulfield says. "It's not just about the first week. It's about where do you go from here?"

Rapper Big K.R.I.T. debuted in the No. 5 spot on the Billboard chart, selling 44,000 copies of Cadillactica, while Nick Jonas moved 37,000 copies of his self-titled solo album, enough to land him in the No. 6 spot.

One Direction is expected to top the Billboard chart next week, perhaps with the second-highest sales week of 2014. Billboard's industry analysts forecast sales in the neighborhood of 420,000, which would place it ahead of 1989's second-week sales of 402,000.

The debut week of 1989, in which Swift sold 1.287 million copies, was the best sales week for an album since 2002.

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