Sales for Madonna‘s new album MDNA were impressive, debuting at number one with 359,000 copies sold in the first week, leaving Lionel Richie in second. But sales for the second week may have set a record for the biggest sales drop in U.S. chart history to date, plunging 88 per cent with an estimated 46,000 copies sold. So why the big drop? According to Forbes, it’s because some of those initial albums were paired with concert tickets, which is where most of the first-week sales came from. Fans buying a ticket for her upcoming tour could either get the CD in the mail or download the album on iTunes for free, with the price already built into the concert ticket. In other words, if you wanted the concert tickets, you had to buy the album as well, hence the inflated sales numbers. Once tickets for her show ran out, album sales dropped. “I do think that all the people involved in the Madonna ticket-CD deal should apologise to Richie for denying him his rightful place at No 1,” journalist Roger Friedman wrote on the Forbes website. “That promotion artificially inflated Madonna’s numbers.”