Prince tops U.S. charts for first time in 17 years

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Innovative funk rocker Prince
scored his first No. 1 album on the U.S. pop charts in almost
17 years with his latest release, “3121,” his record label said
on Wednesday.

The album sold 183,000 copies in the week ended last
Sunday, and also ranked as his first release to debut at No. 1
on the Billboard 200, according to a statement from Universal
Records.

Prince, 47, last topped the charts in 1989 with the
soundtrack to the “Batman” movie, and also reached No. 1 in
1985 with “Around the World in a Day” and in 1984 with “Purple
Rain.” At that time, albums usually worked their way up the
charts, based on the educated guesswork of the compilers.

Since 1991, the charts have been calculated with more
accurate point-of-sale data collected by Nielsen SoundScan, and
it is more common for albums to debut at No. 1.

Prince lost his commercial touch in the 1990s, but he has
started to recover some of his glory in recent years. On the
heels of his 2004 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame, he launched a successful tour and released an album,
“Musicology,” that debuted at No. 3 in April 2004 with sales of
191,000 copies.

That album went on to ship more than 2 million copies,
largely because Prince gave away a copy to everyone who bought
a concert ticket. The compilers of the Billboard 200 have since
changed their rules so that such freebies do not count.

Universal Records is a unit of Vivendi Universal SA.