‘High School Musical 2’ is in a class by itself

Without any high-powered competition, the soundtrack to “High School Musical 2” cruised to a fourth straight week atop the national album chart, selling 165,000 copies. Only one album premiered inside the Top 20, and “HSM2” is the only album to sell more than 50,000 copies last week, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

As a particularly grim reflection of how far music sales have fallen recently, sales of the 200 bestselling albums in the nation last week totaled just short of 2.1 million copies, the lowest of the SoundScan era, and less than ‘N Sync sold by itself in one week in 2000, when the pop group set the record for first-week sales of 2.4 million copies of its “No Strings Attached” album.

The reign of “HSM 2,” the first album to hold the No. 1 slot for four weeks since rapper 50 Cent’s 2005 album “The Massacre,” is expected to end next week. A winner in the much-ballyhooed battle for hip-hop supremacy between Kanye West’s “Graduation” and 50 Cent’s new “Curtis,” released head-to-head on Tuesday, will be crowned next week.

Early retail indicators are predicating a West victory. “Graduation” was outselling “The Massacre” at major retailers.

That doesn’t guarantee that a rapper will be No. 1 next week. Country superstar Kenny Chesney also released his new “Just Who I Am: Poets and Pirates” album on Tuesday, a collection that’s already yielded two radio hits. Still, a Chesney upset seems unlikely given Billboard magazine’s report of Tuesday’s first-day sales of 437,000 for West, 310,000 for 50 Cent and 107,000 for Chesney.

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todd.martens@latimes.com