Last week I wrote about how the first two albums to hit number one on the Billboard 200 charts were made of more than half digital sales. That trend will continue with the third number one album with the Hope for Haiti Now, which was made of not just exclusively digital sales but only two days of sales (January 23 & 24) where it still racked up 171,000 units.
Before Hope For Haiti Now was released, the expected number one was once again to be Susan Boyle’s I Dreamed a Dream. It was the number two this week (86,000 copies, about half of HFHN) and one with very low digital sales overall (currently 83 on iTunes’ album chart).
This is, of course, very good for the relief efforts in Haiti because all of the proceeds generated go to rebuilding the country, but if the trend of more people getting their music online (and legally!) continues, it’ll be bad for record stores in the long run.
--Tagged under: charts--
With all of talk of the Pazz and Jop votes that came out Tuesday night, something interesting happened on the Billboard 200 charts that might have been easy to miss. According to Yahoo’s chart watcher Paul Grein:
Vampire Weekend’s sophomore album, Contra, enters The Billboard 200 at #1 with first-week sales of 124,000. That includes 74,000 digital copies, which is 60% of its total. This is the second week in a row in which the #1 album has sold more digital than physical copies. Ke$ha’s Animal debuted last week with sales of 152,000 copies, more than three-quarters of them (76%) sold digitally. These are the first #1 albums in chart history that sold more digital than physical copies in the weeks they were #1.
Four other #1 albums came close, with digital sales accounting for between 40% and 45% of their sales totals while they were #1. These albums, and their digital percentages: John Mayer’s Battle Studies (45%), The Fray’s The Fray (44%), Colbie Caillat’s Breakthrough (41%) and Coldplay’s Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends (40%). Note that all four of these albums were released since June 2008. I think this is what they call a growing trend.
I don’t think any more needs to be said.
--Tagged under: ke$ha--
--Tagged under: vampire weekend--
--Tagged under: charts--
Something really interesting could happen on the Billboard Top 200 next week: a band I really enjoy will debut at number one.
Billboard is estimating that Vampire Weekend’s sophomore album Contra will sell somewhere between 60-75,000 copies. That might be a little low because this week’s number one album, Ke$ha’s Animal, sold about 152,000 copies and would have to have a 50% second-week plunge to be bested if the VW projections hold.
The industry analysts at HITS Daily Double also predict that VW will come out on top next week, but they forecast sales between 110-120,000 copies, which would be more in line with what it would take for an album to debut at number one.
It’ll be another week before the charts come out, but I’ll be sure to update this once final numbers are in. In the meantime, I want to listen to Contra again.
--Tagged under: charts--
--Tagged under: vampire weekend--
Tonight was the debut of this season’s “American Idol”, which is significant because it’s the first without Paula Abdul and the last with Simon Cowell.
The show has produced two legitimate stars, Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson (the jury is still out on Adam Lambert and who knows what’ll happen with Daughtery long-term). They’ve both had quite a bit of success, but I was shocked to find out which has sold more records. Billboard answered it this week when a reader wrote in and asked just that:
In advance of the new season of “American Idol” Tuesday night, the top-selling champion, in terms of album sales, is …
… as you guessed, Carrie Underwood. She has sold 11,149,000 albums in the U.S. to date, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Kelly Clarkson follows with U.S. album sales of 10,494,000.
How did each artist fare with their latest albums? Clarkson’s “All I Ever Wanted,” released in February, has sold 815,000 copies. Underwood’s “Play On,” released in early November, has sold 1,183,000 copies.
My guess would have gone the other way because I know Clarkson’s Breakaway album was a big success and Underwood’s latest, Play On, isn’t particularly memorable to me (but it did sell well).
--Tagged under: american idol--
--Tagged under: charts--
--Tagged under: carrie underwood--
--Tagged under: kelly clarkson--
I’ve written before about the difference between the pop charts and the Hot 100. The Hot 100 is the definitive record for the top singles at any given time (and is a composite of airplay, sales and online streaming), whereas the pop charts only track radio airplay.
I don’t refer to a song as a true number one song unless it’s at the top of the Hot 100 because there are so many different charts and the ranking of number one becomes a little less meaningful when the criteria is dilluted. (Same goes for albums and the Top 200.) Sure, some great songs (“Toxic” is the first to come to mind) were big hits but never hit number one on the Hot 100 (but did on the pop chart) while lessers, like Owl City’s “Fireflies” topped the Hot 100.
The reason I bring this up, though, is because it was announced this week that Lady Gaga became the first artist to have her first five singles hit number one. Her first two, “Just Dance” and “Poker Face” both did hit number one on the Hot 100 and the next three did land in the top 10 (“Bad Romance” may still reach the penthouse when Ke$ha’s momentum for “Tik Tok” slows down), but this first five singles record is less impressive when you consider that the pop chart (or Top 40 Mainstream) has been tabulated since October of 1992.
On another note, The Avett Brothers have the number one album on the folk charts now and it was the first-ever non-holiday album to top the charts, but that is because the chart is barely a month old. Not to discount The Avett Brothers at all, but their most recent album is currently #130 on the Top 200 and number one on the folk charts, which shows the limited market share the genre holds. (They did peak at #16 for their latest album, I and Love and You, but that was in October, before the folk chart even existed.)
While Lady Gaga did technically take her first five singles to number one, and that is certainly impressive, it would just be more impressive it it wasn’t such a technicality.
--Tagged under: lady gaga--
--Tagged under: charts--
In 2009, both The Beatles (thanks to their entire catalogue being reissued) and Michael Jackson (no thanks to a tap on the shoulder from The Grim Reaper) sold a bunch of records but they didn’t show up in the Billboard 200 chart because of a since-changed rule that prevented back catalogue albums from appearing in the Top 200. Jackson was the best-selling artist of 2009, but if you looked at a composite of the sales charts, you’d think it was a race between Taylor Swift and Susan Boyle.
That led to another legendary album reentering the Top 200 for the first time in over twenty years recently. Billboard reports:
Four weeks ago, Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” returned to the Billboard 200 following a gap of more than 21 years, extending its record to a 742 total weeks on the chart.
This week, the collection re-enters at No. 91, upping its total to 743 frames on the survey. It’s not, however, the only version of the album on the chart.
I’m not sure what prompted Dark Side of the Moon’s return to the Top 200, other than the release of an album from The Flaming Lips that (unnecessarily) covered the same album from beginning to end, altough Pink Floyd still outsold the Flaming Lips’ update, which appeared at #157 this week.
While records are made to be broken, it’ll be just a little harder now for anyone to top Pink Floyd’s amazing record of more than fourteen years on the Billboard 200.
--Tagged under: charts--
--Tagged under: pink floyd--
“Tik Tok” by Ke$ha is now the number one song in the country, knocking Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ tourism jingle “Empire State of Mind” off the top of the Billboard Hot 100.
While “Tik Tok” (a song I hate, by the way) is the number one song overall, it’s only the number two song on Billboard’s pop charts (Iyaz’s “Replay” is the number one pop song right now). I wondered how that was even possible, and last week the difference was even more striking: “Tik Tok” was the number two song on the Hot 100 and fifth on the pop charts. The answer, I found, is on how each chart is tabulated.
The brilliant Chris Molanphy directed me to this explanation from Billboard for how “Tik Tok” was number two on the Hot 100 last week while Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” had greater digital sales and radio airplay last week but came in below “Tik Tok” at three. Billboard says:
On the Hot 100, it is, indeed, a rare occasion when a song leads another in airplay and sales, yet trails on the Hot 100. The Hot 100 is mainly an airplay and sales hybrid chart. However, online song and video streaming from AOL and Yahoo! contributes, as well, and when airplay and sales totals are close, streaming can be a tie-breaker.
So the Hot 100 is a composite of airplay and digital sales of singles, with online streaming from AOL and Yahoo! also factored in. For the pop chart, Billboard says it’s “the week’s hottest pop songs, ranked by mainstream top 40 radio airplay detections as measured by Nielsen BDS.”
The airplay is good but it isn’t what’s propelling the song; that’s coming from digital sales (just passing Lady Gaga to be number one on the Digital Songs chart and is currently the number one single on iTunes).
For better or (much, much) worse, “Tik Tok” is a big hit, even if it’s a confounding one - in many different ways.
--Tagged under: charts--
--Tagged under: ke$ha--
The votes, err, sales figures are in and Rage Against the Machine sold more records than Joe McElderry in the UK. This week.
McElderry was the winner of the “X-Factor” (“American Idol” for Brits, which even includes Simon Cowell) in the UK and it’s become something of a tradition that the “X-Factor” winner has had the number one single at Christmas time. McElderry’s single was a cover of the Miley Cyrus hit “The Climb”.
Fans of the rap-metal group Rage Against the Machine wanted to take the power to the people and started a Facebook campaign to have the 1992 RATM single “Killing in the Name” become the number one single instead of “The Climb”. Why “Killing in the Name”? Well, Wikipedia calls it “a heavy, driving track featuring only eight lines of lyrics. The ‘Fuck You’ version, which contains 17 iterations of the word fuck.”
RATM, who was never above supporting left-wing murderous guerrillas like The Shining Path in Peru, which Wikipedia, again, says:
Widely condemned for its brutality,[3][4] including violence deployed against peasants, trade union organizers, popularly elected officials and the general civilian population,[5] the Shining Path is regarded by Peru as a terrorist organization. The group is on the U.S. Department of State’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations,[6] and the European Union[7] and Canada[8] likewise regard them as a terrorist organization and prohibit providing funding or other financial support.
This isn’t about the company Rage (naively) kept, though. It’s about their “subversive” (and successful) campaign to have make “Killing in the Name” the number one single.
Of course, the way you get your songs at the top of charts is by buying stuff (the singles charts are a combination of digital sales and radio airplay). Rage Against the Machine sold a lot of records during their time for Epic Records (a subsidiary of Sony). Not coincidentally, Sony also put out McElderry’s single.
Popjustice thought the whole thing was silly, writing:
From what we can gather the point is to divert money away from the ‘machine’ of The X Factor, which propels its own acts (and other Sony artists) into the charts at the end of every year. Which might be slightly more effective if Rage Against The Machine weren’t signed to, er, a Sony label. Still, punk rock, right?
Well, apart from the whole ‘give Sony loads more money as a result of Simon Cowell’s actions’ thing there’s a deeper problem at the heart of all this, too. ‘Killing In The Name’ is being embraced here for its perceived subversiveness, but it was released almost two decades ago and the fact that it’s being wheeled out again as an ‘alternative’ - that it needs to be wheeled out again as an alternative - is proof of how ineffective it must have been. It (in the sense that ‘it’ has here been interpreted as ‘a revolution against the mainstream’) failed. The mainstream won. And do you know what? When it comes to the Top 40, and hit singles, and the Christmas Number One, the mainstream always will win. The Top 40 is a popularity chart and the alternative to popular music is unpopular music which by definition isn’t popular enough to get in the Top 40.
According to the BBC, the campaign was started by an English couple named Jon and Tracy Morter, who led a similar (but unsuccessful) campaign last year to do the exact same for the meme-tastic Rick Astley.
Not all of Rage’s causes were as misguided as supporting murderous terrorists in Peru (let’s not mince words here), some were actually quite righteous but in the end, they got to feel relevant again, some anti-popists got to think their opinions matter (thanks for that one, Maura), this couple got their names in the news again, Simon Cowell didn’t get his way and Sony made a whole bunch more money because instead of having just the number one single, they now have the number one and number two single.
Well done everybody, well done.
--Tagged under: rage against the machine--
--Tagged under: charts--
Is U2’s twelth album, No Line on the Horizon, the best album of 2009? Rolling Stone says yes. Lots of other places suggest a little better than mediocrity.
To be fair, the U2 album has gotten a handful of rave reviews, including a five-star review in Rolliing Stone, written by David Fricke and the previous U2 LP, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb did only get a four-star review from the magazine amid a lot more hype back in 2004. There was also a rave in the now-defunct Blender, but for the most part, NLOTH has gotten mostly middling reviews; it has a composite score of 72 according to Metacritic, which means it’s about as good as Julian Casablancas’ debut solo album (which I like actually quite a few bits of), slightly better than albums by Adam Lambert, Shakira and Nelly Furtado (all 71) but not as good as albums by Mika (75) or Paramore (73).
Moreover, it was 31 on both Spin’s top albums list and Amazon’s. Of course, Rolling Stone can rank their albums wherever they like for whatever reason they like. They did put the band (or at least Bono and The Edge) on the cover recently (arguably the worst cover in the magazine’s history) and two issues later the cover featured Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger and, yes, Bono. Strangely, that top 10 list is the first to send my blood pressure though the roof without including Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion.
I’m anxious to see which RS writers include NLOTH on their Pazz and Jop ballots (so far, I’ve only seen one top 10 list from an RS writer, Jody Rosen, who did not include it or one of its singles anywhere). NLOTH horizon was a critical and commercial flop (it only spent one week at the top of Billboard’s Top 200) but maybe it still sells magazines and the “best album of the year” award is a way of thanking the band, or maybe No Line on the Horizon is that good and everyone else missed it. U2 is still big, it’s the album sales and accolades that got small.
--Tagged under: u2--
--Tagged under: rolling stone--
--Tagged under: charts--
