Billboard 200

Billboard 200

The Billboard 200 is a ranking of the 200 highest-selling music albums and EPs in the United States, published weekly by Billboard magazine. It is frequently used to convey the popularity of an artist or groups of artists. Often, a recording act will be remembered by its "number ones", those of their albums that outsold all others during at least one week.

The chart is based solely on sales (both at retail and digitally) of albums in the United States. The sales tracking week begins on Monday and ends on Sunday. A new chart is published the following Thursday with an issue date of the Saturday of the following week.

Example:

Monday January 1 – sales tracking week begins

Sunday January 7 – sales tracking week ends

Thursday January 11 – new chart published, with issue date of Saturday January 20.

Normally new products are released to the American market on Tuesdays. Digital downloads are included in Billboard 200 tabulation, as long as the entire album is purchased as a whole. Albums that are not licensed for retail sale in the United States (yet purchased in the U.S. as imports) are not eligible to chart. A long-standing policy which made titles that are sold exclusively by specific retail outlets (such as Wal-Mart and Starbucks) ineligible for charting, was reversed on November 7, 2007, and took effect in the issue dated November 17.

The current number-one album (as of the issue dated December 8, 2012) on the Billboard 200 is Unapologetic by Rihanna.