Capping one of pop music's biggest comebacks, Mariah Carey has overtaken rap star 50 Cent in a year-end battle to claim the hottest-selling album of 2005.

Carey's Grammy-nominated "The Emancipation of Mimi" climbed to the No. 1 spot for the year on U.S. sales of 290,000 copies during the week ending December 25, raising her 37-week total to 4.87 million units, retail tracker Nielsen SoundScan reported on Wednesday.

Assuming "Mimi" stays the course through the post-Christmas sales rush, Carey would become the first female solo artist to boast the year's top album since Alanis Morissette in 1996 with "Jagged Little Pill."

50 Cent slipped to No. 2 for 2005 as his sophomore set "The Massacre" posted sales of 30,000 copies last week, taking his 43-week tally to 4.83 million units, Nielsen SoundScan said.

Blige sold 727,000 copies of "The Breakthrough" to claim the third chart-topper and the best sales week of her career, while Foxx marked his return to music by landing at No. 2 with "Unpredictable," which sold 598,000 copies its first week.

Overall album sales for the week ended Christmas Day were up 2 percent from the same period a year ago, following three straight weeks of double-digit declines, according to SoundScan.


Source: Reuters

We Belong together is the #1 single of the year (and the decade) and also had the biggest radio audience of any song in billboard history.


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[Edited 12/29/05 22:33pm]

twink69 said:

Maybe it's because I don't pay attention to chart specifics as much as I used to, but how is that possible? Are they tracking airplay differently now? It's not even her biggest #1, but it's the biggest radio hit of alltime? I don't get it.

RipHer2Shreds said:

It is her biggest hit ever (One sweet day was number #1 for longer though) she had three weeks where her airplay was over 230 million of something like that, which is the bigest audience a song has had in a single week.