Britney's Blackout Lights Up Charts

Thu., Nov. 1, 2007 12:37 PM PDT by Josh Grossberg

Britney Spears has done it again. And this time it's no oops.

Despite the media circus surrounding her custody battle with Kevin Federline, endless tabloid tales of her head-shaving, underwear-eschewing escapades and a lip-synching debacle at the Video Music Awards, Spears seems poised to do the unthinkable: resurrect her faded career.

The "Gimme More" singer is on track to defy naysayers and top the charts with Blackout, her first studio album since 2003's In the Zone. And perhaps even more astonishing, Spears has managed her comeback while virtually refusing to promote the album in the traditional ways, ticking off her label, Jive/Zomba Records.

According to sales figures from Nielsen SoundScan and Billboard, Blackout sold 124,000 copies its first day of release on Tuesday, more than double the closest competitor and the reigning chart topper, Carrie Underwood's Carnival Ride. The digital album currently ranks tops on the iTunes bestseller list.

The chartmeisters project Blackout will sell between 300,000 and 350,000 by the end of the sales period this coming Sunday, easily giving her a fifth number one album.

Still, the numbers won't come close to her glory days. In the Zone sold 609,000 in its opening week. Underwood's Carnival Ride, meanwhile, tallied 527,000 copies last week, ranking as the bestselling first week by a female artist in 2007.

According to some insiders, Blackout will top the charts in spite of Spears.

The singer has refused to do any substantial publicity following her much-mocked MTV VMA performance of "Gimme More." For the song's subsequent stripper-themed video, Spears left midshoot, forcing the director to use a body double.

She also declined to do any radio or TV interviews and has skipped auditions for dancers for additional videos and a possible tour.

Along the way, her manager and legal team quit and her label handlers have been fuming, sources tell E! Online. Jive apparently wants Spears to focus on Blackout, which has scored solid reviews from major critics, and get the media attention away from her offstage antics.

Speaking of the latter, a group of Spears' former employees and associates launched a MySpace campaign called Be Proactive to Help, urging fans to boycott the disc "until she's better."

To be fair, not all the roadblocks were Spears' fault.

Jive moved up the release date from Nov. 11 after several sites posted the entire album as MP3s. The label later sued blogger Perez Hilton for linking to the illicit tracks.

And publicly at least, the label is saying all the right things:

"We absolutely stand behind Britney."