Bruno Mars' Unorthodox Jukebox Tops Billboard 200 Chart After Amazon MP3 Sale

Bruno Mars may feel like he's locked out of heaven, but he isn't locked out of the No. 1 spot on Billboard's list. Almost exactly three months after his Unorthodox Jukebox album debuted comes word that it has reached No. 1 on Billboard 200, thanks in part to a recent sale at Amazon, which temporarily priced the album - along with a number of other albums - at $1.99.

Billboard posted the news today, stating that Bruno Mars has claimed his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200. This milestone just so happens to follow a recent sale, which took place on Tuesday, February 26 and set the album at $1.99. The set sold 95,000 copies during the week ending March 3 (last Sunday), and that sale is likely a catalyst to album's chart rise, finally landing at the top. It's wroth noting that Amazon's prices for certain albums are already pretty low. Two bucks for an album seems like a steal, but it's really "only" about half-off, when you consider that Amazon currently has the album priced at $3.99. That in itself is a great offer, especially by comparison to other stores that sell the MP3 album for more than $10.

Mars' latest album isn't the only one that benefited from this sale. Billboard notes that Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' The Heist was also marked at $1.99 the same day and saw a jump from 16 to 4, with 42,000 albums sold after the sale. It didn't hurt that they were also featured on Saturday Night Live last weekend either. And, like Unorthodox Jukebox, The Heist's post-sale price was raised to $3.99 after the sale. By comparison to the $11.99 iTunes price tag, that's a pretty fantastic deal for the same album.

Speaking from personal experience as a music consumer, and someone who purchased multiple MP3 albums through Amazon, the site's low prices have made them more enticing than iTunes for music these days, and it's clear many people are starting to catch on to that, which is causing a noticeable impact on the charts. For those who haven't tried out Amazon's MP3 store, not only does the site make purchased music available streaming through their cloud player, but there's also the option to download purchased songs/albums and store them on iTunes (and/or transport them to your mp3 player). Amazon has a number of albums on sale this month. And, if you're like me and want to be kept in the loop on all of the site's sales, you can sign up for their email list.