What Dubious Chart Record Is Madonna's MDNA on Track to Set?

Hitmaker's latest release isn't as popular as it seems now that the results of second-week sales are in

Forget heart. Madonna would probably like fans to open their wallets.

Unfortunately for the Material Girl, their failure to do so just may wind up helping Madonna set the record for the biggest second-week sales drop in chart history.

That's something to remember, all right.

MDNA debuted atop the Billboard 200 chart with 359,000 copies sold its first week in stores. But the album's second-week sales plummeted by a whopping 88 percent to an estimated 46,000 copies.

Why the steep drop-off?

According to Forbes, the reason is because the "Get Into the Groove" singer and her record label, Interscope, decided to bundle the disc with tickets to her upcoming concert tour—which Billboard includes in its count and which is a nice little loophole allowing an artist to artificially bump up the numbers.

But once her shows sold out and there were no more tickets to buy, MDNA suffered a sharp decline, which means that had she not used the promotional trick, runner-up Lionel Richie would likely have taken the No. 1 spot with his new country duets album, Tuskegee.

Ouch!

Also not helping, Madonna opted to do little in the way of traditional PR for the set apart from headlining the Super Bowl halftime show, popping up at Miami's Ultra Music Festival and giving a few online interviews, including a Facebook chat with Jimmy Fallon.

While MDNA may turn out to be a disappointment saleswise, Madonna does have one thing going for her: Her single "Give Me All Your Luvin'" reached the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, extending her record as the artist with the most top-10 hits.