Preliminary sales numbers from industry rag Hits have last week’s top three slots on this week’s new-release-stuffed album-sales chart taken by Paramore, Barbra Streisand, and Mariah Carey, respectively—and yes, that’s Mariah coming in behind the new effort by Barbra Streisand. The “official” tally from SoundScan will come later today, but for now let’s speculate:
• How are the lambs going to react to this latest twist in the battle of the divas? (My guess: They’ll ignore Babs’ existence and instead focus on the fact that Mimi’s new disc outsold that Madonna hits-retread.)
• Is this going to accelerate the timetable of the Memoirs remix album, which will apparently (and thankfully) feature a peppier version of that Foreigner cover? (Signs point to yes. Look for the “deluxe” issue of this album to be rush-released to stores for the holidays.
• And finally, should we even be making that big a deal about this, since none of these albums broke the 200,000-sold mark anyway and so any claims that any of these artists are genre-spanning blockbuster pop stars are kind of difficult to justify? It’s a hard question, but one worth thinking about! (And again, I say: Poor music.)
UPDATE: Wow, Barbra Streisand is No. 1!
Building Album Sales Chart [Hits]
True, but a year from now, few people going to remember how many copies each album sold in their debut week; the only statistic that’ll get repeated is where they debuted. In that case, great news for Paramore, less so for Mariah.
Cut to: Lambs suddenly declaring that “charts don’t matter” when charts were the primary device used to defend her output in the past.
How did Miranda Lambert do? That album won’t be getting out of my rotation for a while…
Actually, it’s Brabra.
@Thierry: No. 8, 68,000 copies.
Never mind – I just found it. 67,000 isn’t bad, especially considering that neither singles has lit up the charts. Maybe they’ll rush to release “The House That Built Me”, co-written by tearjerker specialist Allen Shamblin (“I Can’t Make You Love”, “Don’t Laugh At Me”, “He Walked on Water” – like I said, “tearjerker specialist”) next…
@Thierry: That is a fantastic album, for sure.
@ObtuseIntolerant: No kidding – on my first listen, I kept waiting – in vain – for the first so-so song. It actually reminded me a lot of Patty Griffin’s Flaming Red, but with a tougher and (somewhat surprisingly) stronger set of songs.