The ultimate career move, revisited

If pop catalog albums weren't ineligible to appear on the Billboard Top 200 albums chart, Michael Jackson would have the top three albums in the U.S. for the week ending June 30. Thriller, The Essential Michael Jackson and Number Ones moved over 315,000 copies combined. I'm guessing 98 percent of those albums were sold after 5pm last Thursday.

This is the first time since Billboard began using Nielsen SoundScan to track album sales in 1991 that a pop catalog album (let alone three of 'em) sold more copies than the current number one album. It doesn't speak highly of the Black Eyed Peas, whose The E.N.D. will go down in history as the week's number one album despite selling fewer than 86,000 copies.