Ask Billboard: Britney Spears's Career Sales

As always, submit questions about Billboard charts, as well as general music musings, to askbb@billboard.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as your city, state and country, if outside the U.S. Or, Tweet @gthot20

BRITNEY SPEARS'S CAREER SALES

In anticipation of Britney Spears's ninth studio album (and yes, the possessive of "Britney Spears" is "Britney Spears's," as weird as that seems), do you think you could update the Nielsen Music totals for her albums and singles?

Thanks,

Caleb Bender
St. Louis, Missouri

Hi Caleb,

A rare Internet moment: attention to good grammar! That is much appreciated here.

And, yes, you are correct. Per Oxford Dictionary's (another correct usage of " 's" …) website, "With personal names that end in 's': add an apostrophe plus 's' when you would naturally pronounce an extra 's' if you said the word out loud: Dickens's novels provide a wonderful insight into Victorian England." So, because you would say what sounds like "Spears's album," not "Spears' album," the former is correct.

Now that we've started this "Ask Billboard" in the most entertaining way possible (no chewing gum, and there might be a quiz, too), let's get right to answering the question.



Here's an updated look at Spears's (…one more time!) best-selling albums in the U.S. and her top-selling downloads:

Albums: …Baby One More Time (1999), 10.6 million; Oops!...I Did It Again (2000), 9.2 million; Britney (2001), 4.4 million; In the Zone (2003), 3 million; Circus (2008), 1.7 million; Greatest Hits: My Prerogative (2004), 1.5 million; Blackout (2007), 1 million; Femme Fatale (2011), 788,000; Britney Jean (2013), 265,000; The Singles Collection (2009), 250,000.

With 33.1 million albums sold in the U.S., Spears is the 17th-best-selling album artist since Nielsen began tracking sales in 1991. Among women, she's fourth, after Mariah Carey (54.6 million), Celine Dion (52.4 million) and Shania Twain (34.5 million). After Spears, Reba McEntire ranks fifth among women at 30.4 million albums sold.

And, here are Spears's (… I did it again) 10-best-selling downloads (and remembering that her career predates the dawn of the digital era by a few years): "Womanizer," 3.5 million; "Circus," 3.1 million; "Till the World Ends," 2.9 million; "3," 2.3 million; "Toxic," 2.2 million.

"Piece of Me," 1.9 million; "Gimme More," 1.81 million; "I Wanna Go," 1.77 million; "Hold It Against Me," 1.6 million; "If U Seek Amy," 1.3 million.

As for whether we'll get new Britney Spears music anytime soon? "I'm going to try to do my best to do an amazing album," she recently told Billboard. "But, it's not my full priority right now."

Read Billboard's March 21 issue cover story, by Andrew Hampp, for more on Spears's (I'm in the zone …) latest plans, headlined by her Las Vegas residency and its potential renewal through 2017.