Michael Bublé Bubbles Up To No. 1

Canadian smoothie Michael Bublé fell into the No. 1 slot on this week’s Billboard 200; sales of his new album, Call Me Irresponsible, actually fell 32%, but the 145,000-unit sales total he amassed last week was enough to give him the top spot on the album charts.

Biggest Debuts: As Billboard.biz notes, this week was good (we will not say “berry good”) for artists whose names contained a word starting with B. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s Fleetwood Mac-sampling Strength & Loyalty became the group’s first top 10 album since 2000, debuting at No. 2 with 119,000 copies sold. Right behind them was R & B singer Bobby Valentino, whose second album, Special Occasion, opened at No. 3, selling 92,000 copies; Barbra Streisand’s Live In Concert 2006 entered the chart at No. 7, selling 60,000 copies; and Bjork’s Volta entered at No. 9, selling 43,000 copies.

Charting The Decline: The total number of albums sold was up a tick from last week (8.43 million to 8.51 million), but down a whopping 23% from this week last year, when album sales–led by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nick Lachey–totaled 11.04 million units. Bublé’s album sales of 145,000 are about a third of the 442,000 copies of Stadium Arcadium that the Peppers moved a year ago this week.

Nickelback Award For Inexplicable Durability: Just for old times’ sake, we’re going to bestow this award on the band that inspired this category, whose latest album, All The Right Reasons, exist on the charts for the past 84 weeks. 84 weeks! We have no idea what we were doing 84 weeks ago, although we probably did hear a Nickelback song at some point.

Buble Sidesteps Bone Thugs To Claim No. 1 [Billboard]