Lil Wayne crushes the competition on album chart

Lil Wayne crashes in at No. 1 with Tha Carter III.

By Katie Hasty

NEW YORK (Billboard) -- Scoring the highest weekly-sales figure on the U.S. album chart since 2005, Lil Wayne crashes in at No. 1 with Tha Carter III.

The Cash Money/Universal set moved just over 1 million copies in the United States during the week ending June 15, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the first time the six-figure threshold was crossed since 50 Cent's The Massacre in March 2005.

Sales for Tha Carter III, Lil Wayne's first No. 1 on the Billboard 200, were helped along by several of the rapper's new singles, including the Hot 100-topping "Lollipop" featuring Static Major. His previous biggest sales week was a 238,000-unit start for Tha Carter II in 2005, which entered the Billboard 200 at No. 2 and became his fourth No. 1 on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums.

No album in 2006 sold as many as 800,000 copies in a single frame, and the largest sales week since The Massacre belonged to Kanye West's Graduation, which netted an opener of 957,000 copies when it hit stores Sept. 11, 2007.

Plies' Definition of Real sold 215,000 to debut at No. 2, the same position his 2007 album, The Real Testament, achieved. His current hit, "Bust It Baby Part 2" featuring Ne-Yo, is working its way up the Hot 100 singles chart, sitting at No. 12 with a bullet this week.

The multilabel Now 28 compilation slips a notch, from No. 2 to No. 3, with 132,000 copies, a 28 percent sales decrease. Disturbed's Indestructible falls from No. 1 to No. 4 after a 60 percent hit to 102,000. With sales of 101,000 units, Usher's Here I Stand endures a 30 percent slip and drops from the third rung to No. 5. Journey's Wal-Mart exclusive album, Revelation, is down from No. 5 to No. 6 on a 15 percent sales slide to 89,000.

With its first album in four years, hip-hop trio N.E.R.D. bows at No. 7, selling 80,000 copies of Seeing Sounds. Alanis Morissette's Flavors of Entanglement debuts No. 8 with 70,000; her 2004 album, So-Called Chaos, peaked at No. 5.

My Morning Jacket's Evil Urges sold 49,000 copies to give the band its first top 10 album, debuting at No. 9. MMJ's previous chart high-water mark came with 2005's Z, which topped out at No. 67. Rounding out the top tier, Weezer's third self-titled set falls from No. 4 to No. 10 with 46,000 (a 64 percent drop).

At 9.29 million units, album sales are up 22.8 percent from the previous week's sum but are down 3.1 percent compared with the comparable year-earlier week.