Sure, Black Friday was a disappointing day for artists who had new releases out, but a little bit of digging into SoundScan shows that the numbers weren’t all bad. Taylor Swift, for example, had quite the banner week; her new album Fearless experienced a rare third-week upswing, one that was so dramatic, she nabbed the No. 2 spot on the chart, ahead of Chinese Democracy—and her old album surged back into the Top 30, too. There were many other artists whose albums’ sales tallies improved from the prior week, no doubt thanks to some people out there still being OK with the prospect of holiday shopping. (Not too many, but a few.) After the jump, a look at which albums actually performed well on the first-gift-giving-week’s chart, and the family members for whom they’re likely being snagged. MORE »
POSTS FROM "a who charted special report" CATEGORY
videodrone
The Top Five Albums That Are Going To Be Given As Holiday Gifts This Year: An Unscientific Survey
who charted
Kenny Chesney Moves Down To A Deluxe Apartment
This week’s No. 1 album is Kenny Chesney’s bummed-out Lucky Old Sun, which sold 176,000 copies in its first week on shelves–not a bad number by current standards, although slightly off from his 387,000-copy first week total of last fall’s Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates. But as it turns out, the official release date for the album was yesterday, at least, if you’re going by the day on which the plain old, bell-and-whistle-free version of Sun hit stores. It’s a tactic that Sugarland employed earlier this year for the release of Love On The Inside, and to great effect: It came thisclose to outselling Miley Cyrus’ Breakout in its first week. But in these hard times, will people wait for the plain old edition to hit the shops, and cause Chesney to be the rare recipient of a second-week uptick in sales–if they buy it at all? MORE »
who charted
The 27 Albums On This Week’s Billboard 200 That Didn’t Experience A Week-To-Week Sales Drop
While reading over this week’s SoundScan, I noticed–among the thicket of debuts that included Disney’s “new Miley Cyrus” Demi Lovato, Kings Of Leon, TV On The Radio (No. 12!), and the Pussycat Dolls (who just managed to squeak into the top five)–that not many full-lengths that had been out for a while were gaining in sales from the previous week. The No. 1 album, Metallica’s Death Magnetic, held on despite a 61% drop from the previous sales week, while Ne-Yo’s Year Of The Gentleman only dropped from No. 2 to No. 3 on a 67% loss. And the numbers didn’t get much prettier from there. In fact, the first album on the chart to experience a week-to-week gain was all the way down at No. 46: M.I.A.’s Kala, which had a modest-in-any-other-week 6% bump. So I decided to figure out just how many non-debuting albums gained momentum during a week that was marked by a lot of chaos on the financial front, and a 6.8% week-to-week decline in overall sales, not to mention a 28.8% year-over-year drop. Those albums–which constitute a mere 13.5% of the chart–are listed, with their big-board placements and overall sales, after the jump. MORE »
a who charted special report
The “Billboard” Year-End 200: 2007’s Biggest Trend? Albums From 2006
If only the Billboard Awards were still around! Then we’d get to find out that Daughtry had the trade magazine’s top album of 2007 via him covering “Live And Let Die” with Dizzy Reed and Paul McCartney or something. But there’s no time to mourn over that when there’s so much other stuff to gnash your teeth over on this week’s chart, like the fact that Billboard’s December-to-November chart year–not to mention ever-declining album sales–means that the top of the chart is riddled with records that actually came out in calendar year 2006 (and were bought up in big bunches during last year’s holiday season): MORE »
