In what’s shaking up to be a battle of the butterfles, the bean-counters at industry rag Hits are claiming that brand new eyes from the Hayley Williams-led Tennessee outfit Paramore is, after its first day of official availability, on pace to outsell Mariah Carey’s Memoirs Of An Imperfect Angel this week by a margin of about 20,000 copies; Paramore’s projected sales are in the 180k-190k range, while Mariah’s are around 160-170k. And as if that wasn’t enough to rile up the chart-obsessed lambs, turns out that Barbra Streisand’s Love Is The Answer is projected to sell between 150,000 and 160,000 copies! Hits‘ one-day projections for this week’s biggest debuts after the jump.
Paramore, brand new eyes (180,000-190,000)
Mariah Carey, Memoirs Of An Imperfect Angel (160,000-170,000)
Barbra Streisand, Love Is The Answer (150,000-160,000)
Breaking Benjamin, Dear Agony (140,000-150,000)
Alice In Chains, Black Gives Way To Blue (130,000-140,000)
Miranda Lambert, Revolution (65,000-75,000)
Madonna, Celebration (60,000-70,000)
AFI, Crash Love (60,000-70,000)
Obviously this all can change—as a point of comparison, immediately after it being rush-released to retail, Hits was projecting sales between 300,000 and 350,000 for Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3, which wound up moving 476,000 copies in its first week. And Mariah’s faithful are nothing but devoted to her, and her efforts to be the chart-toppingest singer who ever topped a chart ever. So things can evolve! Either way, Mimi and her fans can take consolation in the fact that they’re not Madonna.
PARAMORE GOES FOR TOP SPOT, MARIAH IN HOT PURSUIT [Hits]
Earlier: Navigating Through This Week’s New Releases, From Madonna To Miranda
For posterity’s sake, here’s a rundown of the first-week sales of all of Carey’s albums. A total in the upper 100K’s would place Angel toward the lower middle of the pack:
E=MC2: 463,000 copies
Emancipation of Mimi: 404,000
Charmbracelet: 241,000
Glitter: 116,000
Rainbow: 323,000
Butterfly: 236,000
Daydream: 224,000
Music Box: 174,000
Emotions: 129,000
(I left off compilations/EPs/the holiday disc – most didn’t perform at this level, with the exception of #1’s which moved about 220K its first week – and her self-titled debut, which predated the launch of Soundscan.)
To be fair to Mariah: Many of Carey’s albums are growers – several of the mid-’90s discs had fatter weeks after their debut, and Mimi sold like a champ all through ‘05, long after it debuted. And obviously, Angel is being released in the shitfest sales climate that is 2009, which ain’t Mariah’s fault.
To be real: If that HITS estimate is anywhere close to being correct, Carey’s dropoff from E=MC2 (less than 18 months ago, let’s remember) would be at least 60%. No returning superstar in the past year who’s rolled a depressed first-week total – not U2, not Kanye, not Springsteen, not Green Day – has seen a dropoff that steep from studio album to studio album. It would take a mighty hit single indeed – something on the scale of “We Belong Together” – to resuscitate that disc.
That gap between the two albums of only 17 months is the worrying thing in the context of such a large drop. All the other returning giants of the industry have had longer gaps between albums and thus should have been more susceptible to this year-on-year crash in album sales.
I think E=MC2 eventually topped out at around 1.4m which considering the size of the hole the post-Touch My Body singles disappeared into, wasn’t that bad of an achievement.
HITS numbers are in: she actually debuted third, behind not only Paramore but Barbra! Yes, Barbra:
http://www.hitsdailydouble.com/news/newsPage.cgi?news07782m01
We’ll have to see if these numbers hold up when Billboard/Soundscan release the final numbers tomorrow, but…wow.