Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ Tops Chart With 1.1 Million Copies Sold

Robbie Daw | June 1, 2011 11:53 am

When all was said and done, Lady Gaga’s Born This Way sold 1.108 million copies out of the gate last week, which was obviously way more than enough for the Rolling Stone cover girl to end Adele’s nine-week reign at #1 on the Top 200 and land her first chart-topping LP on Billboard‘s main tally. (By comparison, Brad Paisley’s ninth album This Is Country Music debuted at #2 on the strength of 153,000 copies sold). Born This Way‘s initial success marks the largest first week for an album since 50 Cent’s The Massacre sold 1,141,000 in 2005. Gaga has now posted the second-best first week for a female artist’s album in the Nielsen SoundScan era. (Top honors go to Britney Spears’ 2000 sophomore offering Oops!…I Did It Again, which rolled out with 1,319,000 copies in week one.) Born This Way is also now the 17th album to debut with more than one million copies sold since 1991, when SoundScan began tracking record sales data.

Much has been made of the two days last week (Monday and Thursday) that Amazon’s MP3 store offered up Born This Way for 99 cents. According to Billboard, if you subtracted the entire week’s worth of sales at that particular digital retailer (440,000), the album would have still sold 668,000 copies — i.e. more than the first-week totals of both Adele’s 21 (352,000) and Britney Spears’ Femme Fatale (276,000) combined.

In other words, go pop a bottle of bubbly, Gaga. You’ve earned it.

The Top 10 of Billboard’s Top 200 chart:

1. Lady Gaga, Born This Way *new* *1 week* 2. Brad Paisley, This Is Country Music *new* 3.Adele, 21 4. Glee Cast, Glee: The Music, Vol. 6 *new* 5. Various, MMG Presents: Self Made, Vol. 1 *new* 6. Various, NOW 38 7. New Kids On The Block & Backstreet Boys, NKOTBSB *new* 8. Foster The People, Torches *new* 9. Jason Aldean, My Kinda Party 10. Mumford & Sons, Sigh No More