Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 03/14/2012 at 1:48 PM News

The Popdust Files: 21, adele, Billboard, bruce springsteen, charts, sales, wrecking ball

Bruuuuuuuuuuuce. After 23 weeks at #1, including the entirety of the 2012 calendar year, Adele’s 21 has finally been unseated from the top spot of the Hot 100. Wrecking Ball, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s latest, didn’t exactly set record stores on fire, selling 196,000 copies in its first week—about 25k less than previous effort Working on a Dream—but it was just enough to squeak by Adele, who came up short for the first time this year with only 195k sold. (Still, most albums should be so lucky to sell that poorly in their 55th week on the chart.) Wrecking Ball is Bruce’s tenth chart-topping LP, dating back to 1980′s The River.

Bruce and Adele come in on top of a bunch of surging older albums, whose sales can be traced to discounted download prices on Google and Amazon.com, including Lady Antebellum’s Own the Night (#4), Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto and Drake’s Take Care (#7), the first two of which each sell over 100,000 copies. Lower in the top ten, Luke Bryan debuts at #9 with his annual Spring Break EP, Suntan City (30,000), while indie artist Andrew Bird has his best-ever showing with Break It Yourself (just under 30,000) at #10.

Next week, Adele will have a chance to reclaim her title, but will receive stiff competition from the likes of The Shins’ Port of Morrow, One Direction’s Up All Night, and the soundtrack to The Hunger Games. In the meantime, congrats to Prince and The Bee Gees and company, whose respective Purple Rain and Saturday Night Fever soundtracks remain unmatched for 6th place on the list of all-time longest runs at #1 with 24 weeks. The Purple One wins again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUaqv7jIdpA

[Billboard]