Muse finally earned their first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart thanks to Drones, their seventh album. They knocked out another British act, Florence + The Machine, who fell all the way to No. 4.
Drones might have earned the No. 1 title, but it didn’t move a lot of copies. Billboard reports that it only moved 84,000 units. Of that, it sold 79,000 actual album copies. (The rest of the overall number includes track downloads and album streams.)
Muse’s previous high mark came with The 2nd Law, which came in at No. 2 in 2012.
The No. 2 album of the week was - you guessed it - Taylor Swift’s 1989. The album moved 64,000 units, which was down from last week, but it stayed in the same slot.
Of Monsters And Men held the No. 3 slot with their new album Beneath The Skin, which moved 61,000 unites. It is their highest chart position yet, beating 2012’s My Head Is An Animal.
Last week’s No. 1 was Florence + The Machine’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. The album fell to No. 4 with just 37,000 units in its second week. Amazingly, this is the first time in Billboard history where a British act replaced another British act with a new album. Previous instances have involved albums that had been out for weeks (for example, when Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto interrupted Adele’s 21’s amazing chart run in November 2011, 21 had already been out for some time).
Even though The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers has been available since 1971, the album roared back to the Top 5 with a newly remastered deluxe edition. The new edition moved 36,000 units. (A super deluxe edition came in at No. 65 with 9,000 copies sold.)
There were no other debuts in the Top 10 this week.
Here’s the full Top 10 (*new releases):
Muse, Drones* (84,000 units)
Taylor Swift, 1989 (64,000)
Of Monsters and Men, Beneath the Skin* (61,000)
Florence + The Machine, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (37,000)
The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers (36,000)
Ed Sheeran, X (64,000)
Sam Hunt, Montevallo (31,000)
A$AP Rocky, At.Long.Last.A$AP (29,000)
Maroon 5, V (29,000)
Meghan Trainor, Title (27,000)
image courtesy of Famous/ACE/INFphoto.com