Paramore Tops Album Chart, Barbra Snags Second Place

Preliminary sales numbers from industry rag Hits have last week’s top three slots on this week’s new-release-stuffed album-sales chart taken by Paramore, Barbra Streisand, and Mariah Carey, respectively—and yes, that’s Mariah coming in behind the new effort by Barbra Streisand. The “official” tally from SoundScan will come later today, but for now let’s speculate: • How are the lambs going to react to this latest twist in the battle of the divas? (My guess: They’ll ignore Babs’ existence and instead focus on the fact that Mimi’s new disc outsold that Madonna hits-retread.) • Is this going to accelerate the timetable of the Memoirs remix album, which will apparently (and thankfully) feature a peppier version of that Foreigner cover? (Signs point to yes. Look for the “deluxe” issue of this album to be rush-released to stores for the holidays. • And finally, should we even be making that big a deal about this, since none of these albums broke the 200,000-sold mark anyway and so any claims that any of these artists are genre-spanning blockbuster pop stars are kind of difficult to justify? It’s a hard question, but one worth thinking about! (And again, I say: Poor music.) UPDATE: Wow, Barbra Streisand is No. 1! Building Album Sales Chart [Hits]