Week Ending April 5, 2009: A Prince Beats A King (Of Pop)
Posted Wed Apr 8, 2009 11:55am PDT by Paul Grein in Chart Watch

Who would you say has amassed more top 10 albums, Prince or his one-time arch-rival, Michael Jackson? As of this week, the answer is Prince, and that's true even when you give Michael credit for albums he recorded with his brothers. LotusFlow3r, which enters The Billboard 200 at #2, is Prince's 14th top 10 album. Jackson has notched 13--seven on his own and six with the Jackson 5, later known as the Jacksons. Though Prince and Jackson have been considered rivals since the early ‘80s, Prince owes a big debt to Jackson's trailblazing. 1999 was released five weeks before Thriller, but it hit the top 10 only after Thriller had clocked a few months at #1--and, significantly, only after Jackson's mega-hits "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" broke down MTV's resistance to playing videos by black artists. 1999 ultimately logged 11 weeks in the top 10, no match for Thriller's 78 weeks, but enough to establish Prince as a star. Prince's follow-up, Purple Rain did far better than it would have had Thriller not paved the way. Purple Rain logged 24 consecutive weeks at #1, spawned five hit singles and brought Prince an Oscar and three Grammys.
LotusFlow3r, a Target exclusive, sold 168,000 copies this week. It fell less than 4,000 units short of debuting at #1. Keith Urban's Defying Gravity took the top spot with first-week sales of 172,000. This was the closest margin between the #1 and #2 albums since August, when Slipknot's All Hope Is Gone led The Game's LAX by less than 2,000 units. (It was so close that Hits magazine, which has its own charts, called it the other way, putting Prince at #1.) Two factors helped boost sales of the new album--the bargain price ($11.98) and the fact that Prince's erratic recording career has been on an upswing in recent years. This is his fourth studio album in a row to debut in the top three. It follows Musicology, 3121 and Planet Earth. LotusFlow3r consists of two disks of Prince music and one disk by Prince's latest discovery, Bria Valente. It's Prince's third 3-disk release, but his first to reach the top 10. Prince's earlier 3-disk sets were The Hits/The B-Sides, which reached #19 in 1993, and Emancipation, which hit #11 in 1996. As a postscript, Prince has long used artistic license in coming up with the titles for his albums, inventing such words as Lovesexy and Newpower (as in Newpower Soul). But LotusFlow3r ranks with Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic as his most creative yet.


2. Prince, LotusFlow3r, 168,000. This new entry is the third "exclusive" album to reach the top two since Billboard and Nielsen/SoundScan opened the chart to such albums in November 2007. It follows Eagles' Long Road Out Of Eden and AC/DC's Black Ice, a pair of Wal-Mart exclusives which debuted at #1. No songs from Prince's album are listed on Hot Digital Songs.
[Edited 4/10/09 5:18am]