N Sync, Eminem, Britney Top Y2K Album Sales
Despite all the cries this year of Napster dooming the music industry, it was still an unqualified blockbuster for record sales. How else to sum up a year in which no less than six albums sold more than a million albums in a single week — make that seven albums, if you count ‘N Sync’s No Strings Attached twice for moving 2.4 million its first week in stores? Prior to this year, only two other albums in history — or at least in the ten-year of history of SoundScan — had ever achieved that feat: Garth Brooks’ Double Live and the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium.
Predictably, ‘N Sync ended the year with the No. 1 best selling album. After forty-one weeks in stores, the boy band’s No Strings Attached racked up sales of 9,936,104 copies. Eminem‘s controversial Marshall Mathers LP came in second with sales of 7,921,107, followed by Britney Spears‘ Oops!…I Did It Again (7,893,544), Creed’s Human Clay (6,587,834) and Santana’s Grammy-hogging Supernatural (5,857,834). The Beatles, Nelly, the Backstreet Boys, Dr. Dre and Destiny’s Child round out the Top 10.
Of all the year’s best sellers, the Beatles take the prize for going the farthest in the shortest amount of time. After a mere seven weeks in stores, the Fab Four’s greatest hits collection 1 finished in sixth place for the year with sales of 5,068,300 copies. A hefty 1,258,667 of those were sold in the week before Christmas, making it the holiday season’s undisputed blockbuster.
Record sales remained strong right up until the last day of the year. If sales last week weren’t quite what they were the week before Christmas, they could hardly be expected to maintain the stocking-stuffing madness of the pre-Christmas rush, when the top fifty-eight albums each sold in excess of 100,000 thousand copies. Plenty of shoppers spent their leftover holiday cash in music stores, with another 451,253 of them picking up 1.
The Beatles release was the only title that held onto its position from the previous week; everyone else either took a swan dive or enjoyed a boost up the charts, even with lower sales totals than the week before. Dancehall reggae star Shaggy’s Hotshot sold 280,729 copies — down 189,831 from the week before Christmas — but moved up from No. 5 to No. 3 (behind the Now That’s What I Call Music! 5 collection). Limp Bizkit’s eleven-week-old Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water crawled back up two slots to No. 4, Snoop Dogg’s two-week-old Tha Last Meal jumped from No. 9 to No. 5 and Nelly’s twenty-seven-week-old Country Grammar leapt back into the Top 10, moving from No. 15 to No. 8. Farther down the charts, the Offspring, Rage Against the Machine and K-Ci & JoJo all enjoyed similar chart gains, though the week’s biggest gainer was Crazy Town — the rock & rap group’s Gift of Game rocketed from No. 117 to No. 55 (though sales of the album only went up some 7,000 copies, from 40,666 to 47,945).
Not everyone was so fortunate. The Backstreet Boys’ Black & Blue got a little bluer, falling from No. 2 all the way down to No. 9. Britney Spears’ Oops!…I Did It Again tumbled from No. 8 to No. 21, Faith Hill’s Breathe from No. 12 to No. 25 and ‘N Sync’s No Strings Attached from No. 10 to No. 27.
This week’s Top 10: The Beatles’ 1 (451,253 copies sold); Now That’s What I Call Music! 5 (319,707); Shaggy’s Hotshot (280,729); Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water (258,814); Snoop Dogg’s Tha Last Meal (247,951); OutKast’s Stankonia (220,609); Creed’s Human Clay (195,813); Nelly’s Country Grammar (184,759); the Backstreet Boys’ Black & Blue (171,071) and Sade’s Lovers Rock (155,762).
Top 10 of 2000: ‘N Sync’s No Strings Attached (9,936,104); Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP (7,921,107); Britney Spears’ Oops!…I Did It Again (7,893544); Creed’s Human Clay (6,587,834); Santana’s Supernatural (5,857,824); the Beatles’ 1 (5,068,300); Nelly’s Country Grammar (5,067,529); the Backstreet Boys’ Black & Blue (4,289,865); Dr. Dre’s Dr. Dre 2001 (3,992,311) and Destiny’s Child’s Writing’s on the Wall (3,802,165).