Taylor Swift’s “1989” remains at the top of the Billboard 200 for a second week, not surprisingly, with sales of 402,000 copies during the week ending Nov. 9, the magazine and Nielsen SoundScan reported. That is a drop of 69 percent from Ms. Swift’s first-week sales, but it means that in the two weeks since the album was released, it has sold nearly 1.7 million copies, an extraordinary number these days. By contrast, the disc holding the No. 2 sales spot – the 52nd installment of the “Now That’s What I Call Music!” – sold 59,000 in its second week on the chart, after 103,000 last week, for combined sales that are less than a tenth of Ms. Swift’s.
The chart’s top 10 includes two debuts: Bette Midler’s “It’s the Girls,” Ms. Midler’s first album of new material since her 2006 Christmas album, “Cool Yule,” enters at No. 3 with sales of 40,000; and the Scottish singer and D.J. Calvin Harris’s “Motion” makes its first appearance at No. 5, having sold 35,000. Jason Aldean’s “Old Boots, New Dirt” holds the fourth spot (up from No. 5, last week) with 35,000 sales.
Filling out an eclectic top 10 are Florida Georgia Line’s “Anything Goes,” at No. 6; Barbra Streisand’s “Partners” at No. 7; Sam Smith’s “In the Lonely Hour” at No. 8; Brantley Gilbert’s “Just as I Am,” which benefited from discount pricing at the Google Play music store (where it was 99 cents) at No. 9; and Sam Hunt’s “Montevallo” at No. 10.
On the digital songs chart, Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” having dropped to No. 2, slides back up to the top spot with 190,000 download sales. Billboard attributes the song’s new burst of energy to her performance of the song, as a duet with Miranda Lambert, on the Country Music Awards broadcast on Nov. 5. And just below Ms. Trainor’s song are two tracks from Ms. Swift’s album – “Blank Space,” down from No. 1 last week, with 164,000 downloads, and “Shake It Off,” with 130,000 downloads.