Album Sweep: December 8, 2012 - Part One...

Hey gang, it's time to kick off the first half of this week's "album sweep", where I sample the records making their first appearance on the Top 200 Albums sales chart in Billboard magazine. I've also like usual included links to buy anything you see...

The top-seller of the week in this important sales time (it tracks the week of Thanksgiving) is Rihanna's Unapologetic, which becomes her first #1 album after selling over 200 thousand copies. I guess it's true that there's no such thing as bad publicity (sigh...)

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Last season's winner on American Idol Philip Phillips gets a big opening as The World From The Side Of The Moon comes in at #4, with over 150 thousand copies sold...

Rapper/singer Kid Rock jumps in at #5 with the first album he's released initially digitally and physically, Rebel Soul, and ends up with almost 150K in sales. His 2007 set Rock & Roll Jesus went to #1..

Hard rock kings Led Zeppelin return at #9 with Celebration Day, a recording of their 2007 concert in London where they headlined a tribute concert to music executive Ahmet Ertegun. It sells just over 100 thousand, not bad for a band whose last studio album, Coda, was released in 1982, but they have topped the albums chart seven times...

 The fifth album to debut in the top-10 is by R&B singer Keyshia Cole with her fifth album Woman To Woman at #10. She has had a pair of #2 records in her career so far...

While Philip Phillips starts up in the top-5, the first American Idol winner, Kelly Clarkson, released her first Greatest Hits: Chapter One set, and it just missed the top-10 coming in at #11. All of her full-length albums have made the top-10, with her debut Thankful and 2009's All I Ever Wanted making it to the top spot. This collection has all of Kelly's ten top-10 singles...

Latin rap giant Pitbull is everywhere in the music biz, yet his seventh studio album, Global Warming, only manages to debut at #14. Perhaps it's because his fans snap up all his radio singles one by one (like peer Flo Rida). His last set, Planet Pit, has been his biggest so far, peaking at #7...

Like Kid Rock, another act finally coming to iTunes, Aussie rockers AC/DC, see their new concert CD Live At River Plate, recorded in Buenos Aires in 2009, enter the chart at #66. It's their fourth live set to make the chart - Live went to #15 in 1992...

"Black Friday" caused a lot of action in the sales chart, as deep-discount loss-leaders caused a lot of older sets and compilations to spike in sales. The biggest influence on this is the "Playlist" series, which was priced as low as $1.99. This causes five of those albums to make their first week on the top 200 sellers list. Out of those, the biggest is Playlist: The Very Best Of Destiny's Child, which comes in at #77. It has all ten of the group's top-10 hits on the US pop chart, though not necessarily in their most known versions....

That does it for the first half...out of these nine the three I would recommend the most are the Kelly Clarkson, Led Zeppelin, and Pitbull albums...

I'll be back tomorrow afternoon with the second half of the sweep, with music from Il Volo, Britney Spears, and more...