The last week before Adele’s 25 dominates the Billboard 200 album chart was a war between young pop stars. Justin Bieber faced off against One Direction and The Biebs won out.
Bieber’s Purpose moved 649,000 units during the past week, which is the most units for an album in a single week since Billboard came up with a new measuring stick for the Billboard 200 last year. The number includes the 522,000 actual copies sold, plus streams and track downloads.
Billboard reports that the 522,000 actual copies sold is the biggest number since Taylor Swift’s 1989 started with 1.29 million copies on the Nov. 2, 2014 chart. It’s the best number for a male artist since EMinem’s THe Marshall Mathers LP 2 started with 792,000 in November 2013.
Bieber now has six No. 1 Billboard 200 albums. His last RELEASE not to hit No. 1 was 2010’s My Worlds Acoustic.
One Direction’s last album for awhile, Made in the A.M., moved 459,000 units (402,00 actual albums sold). While that would usually be good enough for a No. 1 debut, it came in at No. 2, behind Bieber.
The entire Top 5 this week is made up of new releases. The others are Logic’s The Incredible True Story, Jeezy’s Church In These Streets and Chris Young’s I’m Comin’ Over.
Adele’s 25, which isn’t available to stream, is expected to set the record for most copies sold in a single week. It’s already sold 900,000 copies through iTunes when it was released on Friday. The record is currently held by *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, which debuted with 2.415 million copies sold in 2000.