Britney's "Femme Fatale" was actually released on March 29th and GaGa's "Born This Way" on May 23rd so not on the same day.

This article is boring because the music within is boring. Who cares really? This is like discussing happy meal sales. No difference...

wait, so the two consumer markets that the music industry is aiming at are nerds and moms? god you're fucking dumb. in a related question, who exactly in stranger-land is this column written for? do people that read the stranger even listen to pop non-ironically? so many questions, and one retarded asshole that could answer all of them by quitting his shitty little job.

exactly...consumer markets...sigh...so depressing really...

A Michaelangelo Matos column in every issue about "what it all means" (not just someone's opinion about something, but spanning different markets and finding useful historical-contemporary context) would be a dream. Thank you! More, please.

Britney fans were never delusional about Femme Fatale being number one the same week that Born This Way came out because, like number #1 said, there was almost two months between the releases of the two albums. Femme Fatale was number one its first week, only to be bumped off by Adele's 21 the following week (which also knocked off Gaga's album after two weeks at number one).

The complaint Britney fans had is that when her Blackout album came out in 2007, Billboard literally changed their rules that week and that denied her having a number one album. Previously, Billboard refused to count one-chain exclusives towards the Billboard 200. The Eagles' Long Road Out of Eden came out the same week as Blackout and LROOE was a Walmart exclusive. Because LROOE did sell more copies than Blackout, Billboard revised their long-standing rules that week.

Even all things being equal (and the playing field clearly wasn't with Amazon offering Born This Way for $.99 twice that week), I don't think anyone reasonably thought Femme Fatale could've outperformed Born This Way because it still would've sold about 700,000 if the $.99 copies were subtracted from its 1.1M total, vs. Femme Fatale's 276,000 first-week units sold.

This is not good writing. "It only made sense that retail threw a party to match, even if it broke them." Them what? The 1980s? How?