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Who Charted? Bad Reviews Don’t Stop Team Breezy

Chris Brown

First!: Sadly, despite the media’s efforts (including ours) to dissuade people from buying his new album, Worst New Music honoree Chris Brown tops this week’s Billboard 200 albums chart with the debut of Fortune. The full-time singer/part-time club destroyer‘s fifth studio album, while decidedly terrible, sold 134,000 copies. Take comfort, though, in the fact that this is less than half the sum of the first-week sales for his last record, the Grammy-winning F.A.M.E. (it pulled in 270,000 copies) and barely a third of Justin Bieber’s Believe debut at No. 1 last week.

2 Through 10: Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream got a 99-cent Amazon MP3 promotion on Tuesday of last week (the day before everyone spun “Firework” at their Fourth of July parties), which helps her snag No. 2 with 80,000 copies sold; so did Gotye’s Making Mirrors (No. 6 with 44,000), fun.’s Some Nights (No. 7 with 43,000), and the Black Keys’ El Camino (No. 10 with 37,000). No. 3, meanwhile, belongs to the Biebs’ Believe (70,000); No. 4 is Maroon 5’s awful Overexposed (68,000), No. 5 is Linkin Park’s Living Things, (64,000), and No. 8 is Kenny Chesney’s Welcome to the Fishbowl (43,000). Mostly thanks to that Amazon promotion, Adele’s 21 nearly misses rock-bottom of the top 10, landing at No. 9 (41,000) — the lowest ranking the album has ever gotten on the chart!

Cheap Seats: Confused about how all these albums returned to the top 10 after Billboard’s announcement last year about how album sales would be counted following Lady Gaga’s Born This Way first-week fire sale? Well, it’s definitely kosher — the now year-old rule states that an album’s sales at $3.49 or below only won’t be counted in its first four weeks on the market. (Teenage Dream came out two whole years ago — time flies, don’t it?)

Goulding’s Gold Star: Though she didn’t break the top 20, Ellie Goulding also benefitted from the same 99-cent Amazon promotion with her 2010 record Lights, which jumped 444 percent to No. 21 with 23,000 copies.