‘Dangerous’ Gathers Steam in 2nd Week : Pop music: Sales of Michael Jackson’s album are up from the debut week numbers. It will maintain its No. 1 chart position when final figures are released Saturday.

Second-week sales of Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” album have eclipsed the album’s debut week numbers, making it the best “second-week” sales tally since Billboard magazine introduced a computerized monitoring system last May.

With sales of about 375,000 copies last week, “Dangerous” will maintain its No. 1 chart position when final figures are released Saturday. The album racked up about 326,500 copies during its first week in the stores, placing it in the top chart position.

While retailers said on Wednesday that they were encouraged by the rise in sales, there is still some question in the music industry whether Jackson’s new release will prove to be a blockbuster like his 1982 “Thriller” and 1988 “Bad.”

Those two albums sold a total of 27 million copies in the United States.

Geoff Mayfield, associate director of retail research at Billboard, the music industry’s leading trade journal, said that he believes Jackson has a good chance to monopolize the No. 1 position on the pop charts throughout the holidays.

Industry insiders attribute much of Jackson’s sales increase last week to delays in sales data reports filed by department stores and discount houses such as K mart. It is believed that about a third of all sales tallied by the monitoring system are made in such stores.

In his second-week tally, Jackson benefited from the holiday sales rush that runs from mid-November until after Christmas and typically accounts for about 25% of the industry’s annual record sales. Total sales are up almost 50% since mid-November--to 15.7 million sales last week.

Mario DeFilippo, senior vice president of the Handelman Co., a Michigan-based distribution firm that supplies records to more than 5,000 discount stores, believes that the album is building momentum.

“The way we see it, there are at least six other hit singles on this album,” DeFilippo said Wednesday.

“This record is going to sell well into next year.”