Kendrick Lamar Earns a Distant Second to Taylor Swift on Billboard Chart

If you make music for a living, you know you've done really, really well when your new album sells almost one million copies more than its closest competitor.

As announced late Tuesday, Taylor Swift's “Red” (Big Machine) sold 1,208,000 copies last week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, easily reaching No. 1. The gulf between it and everything else on this week's Billboard's chart is huge. Kendrick Lamar, a young rapper under the wing of Dr. Dre, sold 241,000 copies of his new album, “good kid, m.A.A.d. city” (TDE/Aftermath/Interscope), a sum that any other time would make him a contender for No. 1 but earns him a distant second this week.

Mr. Lamar's album had 2.8 million streams on Spotify in the United States last week, the second-best showing for a new album this year on that service, behind Mumford & Sons' “Babel,” which had 8 million streams when it came out in September. So far “Red” is not available on Spotify, and last week the only digit al outlet for it was iTunes. This week, however, other digital stores are offering it at big discounts: $8 at Google Play and Amazon's MP3 store, and $5 from 7digital. (At iTunes? $15.)

Also this week, the country singer Jason Aldean, who opened at No. 1 last week with “Night Train” (Broken Bow), fell to No. 3 with 116,000 sales, a 72 percent drop, and “Babel” (Glassnote) fell two spots this week to No. 4 with 53,000.

Two new albums also reached high on the chart. Tony Bennett opened at No. 5 with 36,000 sales of his latest duets project, “Viva Duets,” on Columbia. (This one - not to be confused with his earlier “Duets: An American Classic” or “Duets II” - features Christina Aguilera, Marc Antony, Juan Luis Guerra and other Latin pop singers.) The rising blues-rock guitarist Gary Clark Jr. opened at No. 6 with 35,000 sales of his major-label debut, “Blak and Blu” (Warner Brothers).