It's Alicia Keys's album, As I Am! Here's the article:
Week Ending Dec. 14, 2008: It's The Year's #1 Album...Or Is It?
Posted Wed Dec 17, 2008 11:33am PST by Paul Grein in Chart Watch
If someone asked you to name the #1 album of the year in Billboard's just-published year-end issue, you might say Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III. That is, indeed, the best-selling album so far in 2008 (with two weeks to go). Or you might remember back to last year's surprise blockbuster, Josh Groban's Noel, and, figuring that Billboard's chart year might not conform exactly to the calendar year, guess that. Noel was the best-selling album of 2007 and, as we approach the holidays, is back in the top five on the weekly "comprehensive" chart (which includes both current and "catalog" product). Both would be good guesses, but both would be wrong. Instead, Alicia Keys' As I Am is Billboard's #1 album of the year. As I Am was #4 on Nielsen/SoundScan's year-end chart for 2007 and is #18 on the firm's year-to-date chart for 2008. Since the Billboard weekly and year-end charts are based on Nielsen SoundScan sales data, you may well wonder how this can be. (I wondered that myself.)
It's a question of eligibility periods. As Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard's director of charts, explains in the year-end issue, the magazine's 2008 chart year runs from Dec. 1, 2007 through Nov. 29, 2008. And in that period, As I Am sold more copies than Noel, which finished at #2 (not to mention Tha Carter III, which ranked #3 on Billboard's recap). Pietroluongo doesn't provide exact sales figures, but in the Nielsen/SoundScan era, with its greater transparency, they're a matter of record. In that year-long period, As I Am sold 3,630,000 copies to 3,486,000 for Noel. But overall, Noel has been an appreciably bigger hit. It has sold 4,205,000 copies to date, compared to 3,651,000 for As I Am.
So how did Keys come out on top? The Billboard chart year strongly favored Keys. The chart year began the very week that As I Am hit the chart, with impressive first-week sales of 742,000 copies. That "start date" cut off the first five weeks of Noel's sales, a period in which it sold 379,000 copies. Groban was also hurt on the back end. In the four most recent weeks (including this week), which are not counted in the year-end tally, a seasonally-reinvigorated Noel has sold 509,000 copies, compared to just 21,000 copies for an out-of-gas As I Am. Noel's uncounted sales on either the front end or the back end are more than enough to offset As I Am's 144,000-copy lead during Billboard's official chart year. (If the chart year had started and ended one week later than it did, Groban would have beat Keys handily. His total would have been 3,341,000 copies, to her 2,892,000 copies.)
Billboard didn't deliberately favor Keys: The 2008 chart year adheres to the magazine's usual practice. Why, you may wonder, doesn't Billboard's year-end issue just conform to the calendar year? It's a matter of production logistics. The year-end issue is typically the magazine's biggest issue of the year (this year's edition runs 178 pages). The staff needs the extra time to assemble the issue and, not least of all, sell ads.
But two weeks from today, Nielsen/SoundScan will release its final set of charts for 2008. At that time, the "year-to-date" charts which I have been mentioning for months will become the final and definitive "year-end" charts. As soon as I file my last regular Chart Watch column for the year, I'll file a Chart Watch Extra in which I look at Nielsen/SoundScan's year-end charts from every conceivable angle--and a few that you may find inconceivable!
(There's something more you should know: The dates that appear on issues of Billboard run 13 days after the Nielsen/SoundScan "Week Ending" date that you see at the top of each week's Chart Watch column. So Billboard's 2008 year-end issue actually ends with the Nielsen/SoundScan chart for the week ending Nov. 16, 2008.)
Link: http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/cha...albumor-is-it/