Eventually, someone had to bump Taylor Swift from the top of the Billboard album chart. This week, that distinction belongs to One Direction.
“Four” (Syco/Columbia), the group’s fourth album, sold 387,000 copies in the United States in its first week out, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That is the second-biggest opening for an album this year, after Ms. Swift’s “1989” (Big Machine), which started with a historic 1.3 million. One Direction’s showing also makes it the only group to have its first four albums debut at No. 1 on Billboard’s chart. (Other solo acts have done it before, though, including Britney Spears, Beyoncé and the rapper DMX.)
Unlike Ms. Swift’s album, “Four” was available on Spotify, and was hugely popular on that service. The album had 11.6 million streams in the United States there, a Spotify record for a new album. One Direction has now scored a billion total streams around the world on the service, one of only 14 acts to have done so. But One Direction has a ways to go before catching up to David Guetta, who is No. 2 on the list with 1.6 billion streams, and Eminem, at No. 1 with 1.9 billion, according to Spotify.
Also on the chart this week, “1989” falls to No. 2 after a three-week reign at the top, with 214,000 sales, and the a cappella group Pentatonix rose five spots to No. 3 with 99,000 sales of “That’s Christmas to Me” (RCA).
Nickelback’s latest, “No Fixed Address” (Republic), opens at No. 4 with 80,000 sales, and Garth Brooks’s “Man Against Machine” (Pearl/RCA Nashville), which opened last week in fourth place, falls to No. 5 with 62,000 sales.
This week’s edition of the Billboard 200, the magazine’s standard album chart, is the last to rely solely on sales for its rankings. Last week, Billboard and SoundScan announced that streaming data from Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody and other so-called on-demand services — radio sites like Pandora do not count — would become part of the formula for determining chart positions, along with downloads of single tracks.
