All but 39 of the discs on this latest chart experienced sales boosts, whether slight (such as the 2 percent rise of Gnarls Barkley's St. It was a rather robust week for record retailers, with national sales of the albums that comprise this week's Billboard top 200 reported to be close to 7.6 million - a huge surge from the previous week's 4.5 million-plus. Kingdom Come surpassed sales of 2000's The Dynasty: Roc La Familia - which, at about 558,000, earned the rapper the Billboard albums sales chart's #1 position the week after its release - to earn him his biggest opening-week showing and his seventh career chart-topper. Kingdom Come doesn't top the nearly 722,000 the Flatts sold during Me & My Gang's first week in stores, nor could it best the 684,000 first-week sales of Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds.Īlong with topping every other album this week, Jay's latest album has beaten his personal best. Kingdom Come, Jay-Z's homecoming LP and one of the year's most anticipated releases, was predicted to top country darlings Rascal Flatts' Me & My Gang as this year's biggest-selling debut, with early sales projections providing a ballpark figure of 850,000 scans during one of the busiest shopping weeks of the year.īut while Kingdom Come's more than 680,000 sales easily score him the #1 spot on Billboard's albums chart, Jay-Z is going to have to settle for third place when it comes to the year's biggest debuts. When one of the most successful hip-hop artists of the last decade comes out of a self-imposed hiatus, people are going to have expectations.