The numbers are in: Amy Winehouse, who died last Saturday at age 27, will re-enter the Top 10 of the Billboard album chart this week, with her music racking up greater sales in the days after her death than it had since January.
Another British soul singer will retake the top spot on the Billboard album chart this week, with Adele claiming her 11th week at No. 1. But it was the online sales rush in the wake of Ms. Winehouse’s death that was the biggest news on the pop chart. “Back to Black” (Island), Ms. Winehouse’s breakthrough second album, sold 37,000 copies in the United States in the week that ended Sunday, reaching No. 9, according to data released by Nielsen SoundScan on Tuesday evening. That was the highest weekly sales for the album since March 2008, two weeks after she won five Grammy Awards. “Frank,” Ms. Winehouse’s less-known first album — it was not released in the United States until 2007, four years after it came out in Britain — sold 7,600 copies. Along with the handful of her other album titles, including a B-sides collection and a live record, she sold a total of 50,000 albums last week, 95 percent of them as digital downloads; up until last week her album sales for the year were only 44,000.
Sales of Ms. Winehouse’s singles also shot up in the days after her death. She had a total of 111,000 digital track sales through Sunday, a 2,000 percent increase from the week before; the most popular track was “Rehab,” with 34,000 sales. Since 2007 Ms. Winehouse has sold 3.5 million digital tracks in the United States.
But it was Adele’s “21” (XL/Columbia), out since February, that was No. 1, again, with 77,000 sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan, bringing that album’s total sales in the United States to 2.75 million. It is the first album to rack up 11 weeks at the top slot since Taylor Swift’s “Fearless” in late 2007 and early 2008, and only the eighth album to do so since 1991, when Billboard began using SoundScan’s data to compile its charts.
Also this week, “Kidz Bop 20” (Razor & Tie), the latest in the best-selling series of playground-friendly remakes of pop hits, sold 69,000 copies to open at No. 2. (Thanks to the recent popularity of certain profanities in the charts, two of the covers on “Kidz Bop 20” involve some censorship.) The rock band 3 Doors Down opens at No. 3 with its new album, “Time of My Life” (Universal Republic), which moved 60,000 units; Beyoncé’s “4” (Columbia) rose one spot to No. 4 with 53,000 in its fourth week out; and DJ Khaled’s new “We the Best Forever” (Cash Money/Universal Motown) is No. 5 with slightly less than 53,000. (These numbers are rounded.)