‘Weird Al’ Yankovic has been in the music business for over three decades, but the acclaimed parodist has never scored a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 album chart. That’s about to change, though, at least according to preliminary numbers.
Over the weekend, Billboard predicted that Mandatory Fun would sell around 80,000 copies. Now, that’s already enough to top the album chart in the beleaguered music industry today. However, early numbers posted by Hits Daily Double show that even more music fans bought the record.
The site’s data shows that 104,007 copies of the album were sold this past week. If these are the numbers that Billboard posts later today, then it will be only Weird Al’s third Top 10 album of his career.
Weird Al’s promotion for Mandatory Fun has been nothing short of ingenious. Over eight days, he posted a new video each day, kicking off with the Pharrell Williams parody “Tacky.” The last video was “Mission Statement,” a parody of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s work.
Related: 'Weird Al' Yankovic's 'Mandatory Fun' album review
The other big release of the week was Jason Mraz’s Yes!, which should come in at No. 2. Hits Daily Double’s chart shows that the album sold 83,94 copies.
Rise Against’s Black Market came in third with 50,284 copies. Sia, whose 1,000 Forms of Fear topped the chart last week, took an epic stumble to No. 19 with just 13,498 copies sold.
image courtesy of Jennifer Graylock/INFevents.com