Drake’s ‘Thank Me Later’ Debuts At #1, Posts Third Highest Sales Week Of The Year

Despite the fact that his debut LP leaked weeks ahead of its release date, Drake’s Thank Me Later still managed to land at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 and become the third highest debut of the year (with 447,000 copies sold). As the trade publication notes, only Sade’s Soldier Of Love (502,000) and Lady Antebellum’s Need You Now (481,000) posted bigger first week sales so far in 2010. So how did the rest of the chart play out?

First off, while Glee‘s Journey To Regionals EP trumped both the Twilight Saga: Eclipse soundtrack and Christina Aguilera’s Bionic last week, it drops from #1 to #10 on the new chart. Meanwhile, Bionic falls from #3 to #9—not nearly as bad as Xtina’s #1 to #29 drop on this week’s UK album chart!—while Eclipse slips from #2 to #6.

This makes room for three other debuts behind Drake, starting with Tom Petty & The Heartbreaker’s Mojo at #2. With 125,000 copies sold, Billboard reports it’s the 59-year-old rocker’s best opening sales week since SoundScan started tracking sales in 1991 and his highest charting album since 198o.

Next up is Sarah McLachlan at #3 with her seventh album Laws Of Illusion. The LP sold 94,000 copies, a considerable drop from the 361,000 copies Sarah’s previous studio LP Afterglow opened with in 2003.

But who sells albums anymore (besides Drake, Sade and Lady Antebellum, that is)? Case in point: the #4 debut of the latest NOW That’s What I Call Music. With meager first-week sales of 88,000 copies, NOW 34 marks the first time one of the compilations in the long-running series has sold less than 100,000 out of the gate since the very first one kicked things off with sales of 48,000 in 1998. Now that’s what we call tragic.

Next week: Eminem and Miley Cyrus will do their best to wrestle the #1 position away from Drizzy.

The Top 10 of Billboard’s Top 200 Albums:

1. Drake, Thank Me Later *new* 2. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Mojo *new* 3. Sarah McLachlan, Laws Of Illusion *new* 4.Various Artists, NOW That’s What I Call Music 34 *new* 5. Jack Johnson, To The Sea 6. Various Artists, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse 7. Justin Bieber, My World 2.0 8. Lady Antebellum, Need You Now 9. Christina Aguilera, Bionic 10. Glee Cast, Glee: The Music—Journey To Regionals