New releases will comprise half of the top 10 on next week’s Billboard albums chart, with P. Diddy leading the pack of debut entries.
Right behind Diddy’s top-slot finish, albums by Cam’ron, Weezer and Moby will bump the former chart champ, Musiq, down to #5.
P.Diddy & Bad Boy Records Present… We Invented the Remix will lay claim to the #1 position after selling more than 255,000 copies, according to SoundScan figures released Wednesday (May 22). Cam’ron’s Come Home With Me, the New York rapper’s first album for Roc-A-Fella Records, will come in second by about 30,000 fewer copies, thanks to the hit single “Oh Boy.”
Prized among the bespectacled and backpack-toting, Maladroit, Weezer’s fourth album – released almost a year to the day after its self-titled predecessor – moved almost 152,000 copies to take the #3 position, while 18, the comfort-vibed seventh LP from dance-music maestro Moby, sold more than 126,000 copies to settle for #4.
Rounding out the crop of top-10 chart debuts will be Rush’s first album in six years, Vapor Trails, at # 6. The classic rock trio’s studio successor to Test for Echo sold nearly 108,000 copies in its first week out.
The rest of the top 10 will include Ashanti’s self-titled debut, which will fall from #4 to #7 (96,000); Celine Dion’s A New Day Has Come, slipping six spots to #8 (84,000); Now That’s What I Call Music! Vol. 9 holding at #9 (77,000); and Sheryl Crow’s C’Mon C’Mon dropping three places to #10 (73,000).
Aside from the debuts, no other album among the top 20 sold more copies than it did the previous week. Musiq and Lauryn Hill second-week sales amounted to less than half of their respective debuts, with Hill’s MTV Unplugged 2.0 sliding from #3 to #14.
Further down the chart, the only albums among the top 40 to increase their weekly totals were Jennifer Lopez’J to Tha LO!, which witnessed a 4,000-copy goose to move from #49 to #37, and the soundtrack to “Star Wars: Episode II.” As the latest installment of the sci-fi saga hit theaters, its accompanying John Williams score will rocket from #46 to #21. Meanwhile the other summer-blockbuster soundtrack on the charts, the song-based LP for “Spider-Man,” will swing out of the top 10, falling from #6 to #11.
Other notable debuts filling out next week’s chart include Van Morrison’s Down the Road at #25; Ruff Endz’ Someone to Love You at #27; Get Up Kids’ On a Wire at #57; 3rd Strike’s Lost Angel at #72; the “WWE Tough Enough 2” soundtrack at #82; and Deadsy’s Commencement at #100.
Khia’s Thug Misses, released in April, will make its first appearance on the albums chart at #175, fueled by radio play of her racy track “My Neck, My Back (Lick It).”
