One Direction are the latest chart toppers, dethrone Taylor Swift to sell 400K copies

One Direction has dethroned Taylor Swift to top US album sales charts, but the British boy band's debut was far less spectacular, figures showed Wednesday. Their fourth album, Four, sold 387,000 copies in the United States in the week through Sunday.

One Direction has dethroned Taylor Swift to top US album sales charts, but the British boy band's debut was far less spectacular, figures showed Wednesday.

One-Direction-and-Taylor-Swift-pose-in-the-press-room-at-the-2014-American-Music-Awards-Photo-AFP

One Direction's fourth album, Four, sold 387,000 copies in the United States in the week through Sunday, ending a three-week run by Taylor Swift's 1989 at the head of the Billboard 200 chart, Nielsen SoundScan said.

But the debut week for One Direction was far more modest than that for 1989 which sold nearly 1.3 million albums in the week after its October 27 release.

Swift's album smashed expectations with its sales, which were higher than any other album in a single week since Eminem's The Eminem Show in 2002, when the music industry's overall sales were far higher.

Swift created a stir by removing her work from the streaming service Spotify, accusing the company of insufficient compensation, but One Direction's music remains available on the site.

Starting next week, the Billboard 200 will begin to consider streaming when determining the chart.