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Chrisette Michele's Epiphany Big Enough to Top Hannah Montana
Johnny Nunez/Getty Images
If you hope to keep Hannah Montana down, apparently you need a Grammy winner, a Hall of Famer and a rap boss.
Since topping the charts four weeks ago, the Miley Cyrus-powered Hannah Montana: The Movie has been pushed back to No. 2 by a different artist each week. This time around it was Grammy-winning R&B singer Chrisette Michele.
Her sophomore disc, Epiphany, gave Michele her first career No. 1, selling 83,000 copies, per Nielsen SoundScan, for the week ended Sunday. Hannah Montana trailed at No. 2, fewer than 2,000 copies behind.
In previous weeks, Ms. Montana fell to Bob Dylan's Together Through Life and Rick Ross' Deeper Than Rap, which currently sit at Nos. 5 and 8, respectively.
Michele is doubtlessly jazzed to hit No. 1, but her success comes with a major caveat. Her 83,000-copy open is the worst-selling No. 1 bow in SoundScan history, which started tracking sales in 1991. In fact, during SoundScan's 18 years, only two other albums debuted atop the charts with less than six-figure sales: Notorious B.I.G.'s #1's (99,000 discs) in '05 and Johnny Cash's American V: A Hundred Highways (88,000) in '06.
There's also a bit of bad news for another R&B starlet cracking the Top 10. Despite a red-hot performance on last weekend's Saturday Night Live, Ciara debuted at No. 3 with a career-low 81,000 opening-week copies for Fantasy Ride. Ciara's previous low was 125,000 first-week copies for her 2004 rookie bow, Goodies.
Ben Harper scored the third and final Top 10 debut with White Lies for Dark Times selling 34,000 copies at No. 9. White Lies also topped the Digital Albums chart by selling 15,000 of those copies as downloads.
Just missing the Top 10, Bible-thumpin' metallers the Devil Wears Prada sold 31,000 copies of With Roots Above and Branches Below at No. 11. To show that faith doesn't make 'em soft, the band recruited Dan Seagrave (Morbid Angel, Decrepit Birth) to illustrate the album cover.
Despite the historic lows at the top of the charts, overall sales were actually up over 5 percent from last week thanks to kids gifting their mothers with music. Still, the tally was down nearly 20 percent compared to the same Mother's Day week last year when Neil Diamond ruled the chart.
Here's a recap of the Top 10 albums:
- Epiphany, Chrisette Michele
- Hannah Montana: The Movie soundtrack, various
- Fantasy Ride, Ciara
- Unstoppable, Rascal Flatts
- Together Through Life, Bob Dylan
- The Fame, Lady Gaga
- Fearless, Taylor Swift
- Deeper Than Rap, Rick Ross
- Whites Lies for Dark Times, Ben Harper
- Twilight soundtrack, various
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