Prince tops US charts for first time in 17 years - Yahoo! News

Musician Prince performs at the Brit Awards in London in this February 15, 2006 file photo. On March 29, Prince's record label said he had scored his first No. 1 album on the U.S. pop charts in almost 17 years with his latest release, '3121.' (Kieran Doherty/Reuters)

Prince tops US charts for first time in 17 years - Yahoo! News: "Wed Mar 29, 11:13 PM ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Innovative funk rocker Prince scored his first No. 1 album on the U.S. pop charts in almost 17 years with his latest release, '3121,' his record label said on Wednesday.

The album sold 183,000 copies in the week ended last Sunday, and also ranked as his first release to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, according to a statement from Universal Records.

Prince, 47, last topped the charts in 1989 with the soundtrack to the 'Batman' movie, and also reached No. 1 in 1985 with 'Around the World in a Day' and in 1984 with 'Purple Rain.' At that time, albums usually worked their way up the charts, based on the educated guesswork of the compilers.

Since 1991, the charts have been calculated with more accurate point-of-sale data collected by Nielsen SoundScan, and it is more common for albums to debut at No. 1.

Prince lost his commercial touch in the 1990s, but he has started to recover some of his glory in recent years. On the heels of his 2004 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he launched a successful tour and released an album, 'Musicology,' that debuted at No. 3 in April 2004 with sales of 191,000 copies.

That album went on to ship more than 2 million copies, largely because Prince gave away a copy to everyone who bought a concert ticket. The compilers of the Billboard 200 have since changed their rules so that such freebies do not count.

Universal Records is a unit of Vivendi Universal SA."