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Access Hollywood
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Wyclef Jean’s Yéle Organization still under scrutiny even after being shut down last month, maybe Bow Wow was serious when he told that judge that he was broke since he’s being sued by a bank, Billboard has made changes to the Hip Hop & R&B charts that have pissed some people off and more in today’s UrbLinks.

  JONAH BAYER  

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Michael Jackson may always be the “King of Pop,” but Katy Perry may be entering the late singer’s kingdom. The pop star’s latest disc, Teenage Dream, features an endless string of hits, and if the album’s fifth single, “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” hits the Number One spot, Perry will become the first female artist to ever have five Number One singles off one album, matching a record Michael Jackson set in the late eighties with his album Bad.
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Considering Perry’s newest single jumped 27 spots to the Number Four spot this week on the Billboard Hot 100, it seems as if this is a very realistic goal for the singer whose other Number One smashes from Teenage Dream include the title track, “California Gurls,” “Firework” and “E.T.”
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  EMILY ZEMLER  

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Lamb of God announced they’ve begun recording what will be their sixth studio album. The record is expected to be released in early 2012.
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The metal group is currently in the studio with producer Josh Wilbur, known for his work with Avenged Sevenfold. The group recently invited fans to watch drummer Chris Adler tracking drums in the studio via Ustream. The drummer told viewers, “If at first you don’t hear anything, the audio is tied into the soundboard so you’ll only have audio when I’m playing or we are talking.” You can watch that here.
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Earlier this year, Adler spoke of the writing process for the record, saying that “because of the amount of time we’ve spent on the road and the [rest of the] guys spending time alone in hotel rooms, there’s a lot more material coming into the process than we’ve had in the past. Normally, we would tour, then get together and write. But the guitar players, with the technology changing and improving, have been able to do a lot on their own coming in, so there’s a lot more ideas than we’ve ever had, which is great. Normally,we weed through all the stuff and it takes a really long time to get to what everybody agrees on. Now we’ve got a plethora of material, so I think it’s gonna be… It’s always an interesting process, but I think we’re coming a little more armed this time.”
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  JONAH BAYER  

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According to a Billboard interview with Rick Rubin, Linkin Park are already headed back into the studio to work on the follow-up to 2010’s A Thousand Suns. When asked about the recording process, Rubin explained that Linkin Park is ahead of the game. “Typically we’ll have a once a week meeting to go listen to the songs that they’re coming up with and talk about them,” Rubin said. “For so early in the project, they are much further along than they have been on the last two albums we did. On A Thousand Suns there were still a lot of irons in the fire.”
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  EMILY ZEMLER  

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It should come as no surprise that Lady Gaga’s new album, Born This Way, has landed at Number One on the Billboard Top 200 this week. The real news is that the disc has sold a massive 1,108,000 copies in its first week.
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According to Billboard, that makes it the 17th album to sell one million albums in a week since SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991, and makes this the highest sales week since 2005. The last album to do better was 50 Cent’s The Massacre, which sold 1,141,000 copies in March of 2005. The best-selling first-week record, set by ‘N Sync’s No Strings Attached in 2000, remains untouched. (That disc sold 2,416,000 copies in its first week.)
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Born This Way is Gaga’s first Number One album as The Fame debuted at Number Two and The Fame Monster at Number Five. This achievement is particularly impressive as Gaga’s record label, Universal Music Group, projected a first-week sales total of 400,000 for the new album. The number was aided by AmazonMP3 selling the record for 99 cents for two days last week, which means AmazonMP3 alone likely sold around 440,000 copies.
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