Those of us who regard following the Billboard charts as our version of sports fandom have a problem, of the Roger Maris-in-1961 variety, to contend with on this week's album charts: two different, legitimate No. 1 albums.
On the official SoundScan tally, to be released at end-of-day today and published in Billboard later this week, the victor will be Britney Spears's Blackout, with about 300,000 albums sold.
But in terms of actual, nationwide sales, the winner—announced this afternoon in a press release—is the Eagles' Long Road Out of Eden, with a staggering 700,000 sold.
That's the second-largest first-week total of the year, and it was achieved through just one chain: Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (including Sam's Club and the Wal-Mart/Sam's websites). And therein lies the confusion, and the problem for us score-keepers.
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.jpg "This Year, \"American Idol\" Will Be Won By A Dude Named David (But You Knew That Already)")
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So a few months ago it looked like Henley and Frey Ltd. were going to ruin the year's most expensive TV time slot, with the Eagles rumored to be the entertainment for the 2008 Super Bowl halftime show. Well fear not, one-day-a-year football fans, because although the Eagles are still on track to outsell just about every other musician on the planet in 2007, the National Football League has wised up and instead chosen some weirdo with a fetish for cannibalizing Victorian schoolgirls.
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Don Van Cleave, the head of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores, on the Eagles' so-called Wal-Mart exclusive and its performance on his sales chart of shops that are decidedly not the Bentonville big box: ""...many of our guys picked up the WALMART EAGLES new release at Walmart to resell back in their stores. We heard stories for the past few weeks about customers asking indie stores for the WALMART EAGLES. When informed that they would need to go to Walmart to pick up the title, the customers responded "Dude, we don't go in that damn place" or something similar... (Soundscan) told me that they were obviously resales and they zeroed them out... They don't want to count them twice...Streetpulse let me know...The WALMART EAGLES come in at #22 on our chart." [
