Whitney Houston first woman to have three Top 10 albums in same week

Whitney Houston's popularity seems to be even stronger in death than when she was alive.

This week, for the first time ever, a woman has three top ten albums and the woman is Houston. Even more amazingly, those three albums range from 12 to 26 years old.

Overall, Houston is now up to nine titles in the Billboard top 200:

002. Whitney: The Greatest Hits (174,000)
006. The Bodyguard (47,000)
009. Whitney Houston (30,000)
016. I Look to You (19,000)
030. My Love is Your Love (15,000)
039. I'm Your Baby Tonight (13,000)
073. I'm Your Baby Tonight/My Love is Your Love/Just Whitney (7,000)
105. The Preacher's Wife (5,000)
126. Just Whitney (4,000)
133. Whitney (4,000)

So, what happened that so many of her albums jumped back on the charts almost three weeks after her passing? Sony was finally able to ramp up production of the physical CDs and got them distributed to the retailers. Up until now, the album sales were almost exclusively from digital downloads.

In addition to the first time a woman has ever accomplished this feat, but it's the first time that it has happened 43 years, since July 6, 1968 when Simon & Garfunkel had Bookends (1), The Graduate (2) and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (10). According to Billboard, only three other acts ever accomplished the record before 1968, the Beatles, Peter, Paul and Mary and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass.

Billboard also notes that Michael Jackson also would have had three in the top ten had catalog albums been allowed on the Top 200 at the time of his death.

In other chart news, Adele's 21 racks up its 21st week at number 1, the longest since Prince & the Revolution's Purple Rain held the top spot for 24 weeks in 1984 and 1985. It is also 21's ninth consecutive week at number 1, the longest since the Titanic soundtrack had 14-straight in 1998.