Eminem's 'MMLP2' tops 'Billboard' with 792,000 copies

Edna Gundersen | USA TODAY

Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP 2 sold 792,000 copies its first week, enough to land at No. 1 in Billboard and score the second-biggest sales week of the year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

The number was nowhere near the 1.76 million copies The Marshall Mathers LP opened with in 2000, before piracy clobbered the industry. But MMLP2's take exceeds the bows of 2009's Relapse (608,000) and 2010's Recovery (741,000).

The album was streamed 10 million times in its debut week, according to Spotify.

"Unlike most people in the record industry, he's consistently able to sell hundreds of thousands of records in one week," says Keith Caulfield, Billboard's associate director of charts/retail. "We're talking about an artist repeatedly doing this since his second album. It's normal for him. And he can sell tracks. And he can sell out stadiums. How can you bottle what he does? It's amazing."

The album ranks sixth among the biggest sales weeks of the past five years, according to Billboard. The larger tallies since November 2008 were debuts by Taylor Swift's Red in 2012 (1.2 million), Lady Gaga's Born This Way in 2011 (1.1 million), Swift's Speak Now in 2010 (1 million), Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience in March (968,000) and Lil Wayne's Tha Carter IV in 2011 (964,000).

In first-week sales this year, Eminem is second only to Timberlake.

"Both are considered album artists," Caulfield says. "Eminem is admired as a storyteller, and you need the whole album to get the full experience.

"And both come from the late 1990s/early 2000s era, when the album format was king, before YouTube and digital downloads," he says. "If you wanted music, you had to buy the album. A lot of their fans fondly remember buying 'N Sync albums or The Slim Shady LP, and they still want to buy albums in 2013. It's harder for young artists who don't have that history with fans."

Drake's Nothing Was the Same, which premiered with 658,000 copies in October, falls to third place in the year's lineup.

No other releases this year are expected to eclipse Timberlake or Eminem. One Direction's Midnight Memories, out Nov. 25, is forecast to sell 500,000 its first week, a figure that could shift in coming days. Lady Gaga's Artpop, out this week, is predicted to sell roughly 300,000.

And Britney Spears' Britney Jean, out Dec. 3, "won't do anything close to these numbers," Caulfield says.