Nicki Minaj roars back onto the pop charts tonight. Her “Pink Friday 2” debuts at number 1– without Kanye West bothering her.
“Pink Friday 2” sold a very healthy 222,665 copies including 87,247 paid downloads, CDs, and vinyl. The bulk of the sales was from streaming equivalent.
Still, Taylor Swift has 7 titles in the top 50, three of which are in top 10. So Taylor sold the most albums altogether of any artist.
The rest of the album chart is largely Christmas albums with evergreens from Nat King Cole, Phil Spector’s Christmas album, Frank Sinatra, Michael Buble, Brenda Lee plus, of course, Cher, and Mariah Carey. Most of the Christmas album sales are from streaming, with very little physical product being taken home.
Noah Kahan, fresh off “SNL,” sold around 42K of his album, “Stick Season,” which isn’t bad, Typically, “SNL” does not sell records anymore. Olivia Rodrigo, who was on “SNL” just last week, lodged just 23,611 of her “Sour” album sold. She was not a hit from the TV show. Her material was very disappointing.
Nicki Minaj, meanwhile, gets points for turning down Kanye West’s claim to have a duet they made three years ago placed on his new album. She seems to be a lot brighter than the singers who did the album including Charlie Wilson (terrible decision) and, unsurprisingly, Chris Brown.
