I was kidding back on July 7 when I asked if Eminem was the new Susan Boyle. I had no idea that his latest album would actually spend more weeks at #1 than the sweet little old lady who captured every granny’s heart last Christmas. But there it is: seven weeks on top of the Billboard 200 chart.

1. Eminem – “Recovery” – 116,000 (down 12%)

2. Kem – “Intimacy” – 74,000 (debut)

3. Ray LaMontagne – “God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise” – 64,000 (debut)

4. Iron Maiden – “The Final Frontier” – 63,000 (debut)

5. Trace Adkins – “Cowboy’s Back In Town” – 50,000 (debut)

6. Lady Antebellum – “Need You Know” – 32,000 (up 35%)

7. Arcade Fire – “The Suburbs” – 31,000 (down 40%)

8. Justin Bieber – “My World 2.0” – 30,000 (down 10%)

9. David Gray – “Foundling” – 25,000 (debut)

10. John Mellencamp – “No Better Than This” – 24,000 (debut)

Overall album sales are up a bit from last week when they hit an all-time low at 4,950,000. Paul Grein puts this in historical perspective:

Weekly album sales never once dipped below 8 million units from Jan. 9, 1994 (the oldest date that this historical information is available on the Nielsen/SoundScan site) through April 22, 2007…. On April 29, 2007, weekly album sales dropped below 8 million for the first time. On Jan. 20, 2008, sales dropped below 7 million for the first time. On Jan. 18, 2009, sales dropped below 6 million for the first time. As noted above, on May 30, 2010, sales dropped below 5 million for the first time.

This includes both physical and digital album downloads. But not “track equivalent” albums. People buy about about 20 million songs per week, so the track equivalent total add 2 million per week. Even with that, music sales are going down, down, down.

• Overall album sales in this past chart week (ending Aug. 22) totaled 5.06 million units

• Digital track sales this past week totaled 20.33 million downloads