You cannot deny the power that 25¢ album prices have on record selling. Never before in the history of the music business have we seen such steep discounting mechanism, except for maybe Lady Gaga’s $1 Amazon deal last year that resulted in Billboard changing their chart to ensure that the “Integrity” of the chart wouldn’t be compromised even more in the future. Thus, no album in its first week on the charts can include drastic raw data like that of this chart, if – and here’s the key part – they’re less than a month old. Now, none of the albums from the Amazon and Google price wars were less than a month old. With that in mind, Lady Antebellum moved over 100,000 copies of Own The Night last week with at least 80,000 of those sales going to 25¢ downloads via the competing networks. Other big gainers this week cause of the sale were the Now 31 compilation, Drake’s Take Care, Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter IV and Guns N RosesGreatest Hits.
Luke Bryan’s “Spring Break 4: Suntan City” Breaks Big
Up until that un-expected sale of Lady Antebellum’s Own The Night, the fourth EP from Luke Bryan was charting a course to the #1 slot and would’ve easily taken the spot with 30,000 digital 4 track EPs sold. While it won’t have the ‘legs’ that tailgates&tanlines has, the opening week sales numbers showcases the powerful draw Luke is amongst the younger music buyers of America. The release gives Luke two Top 5 albums on the SoundScan Top Current Albums chart with tailgates&tanlines right behind it. Rounding out the Top 5 this week are fellow ‘young country’ stars Jason Aldean and Eric Church with their latest albums, My Kinda Party and Chief, respectively.
Scotty & JB and the Moonshine Band Lead notable albums
The notable albums this week are lead by Idol’s Scotty McCreery, whose album Clear As Day continues to make its way up the charts to scanning platinum (less than 40,000 to go) and new release Beer For Breakfast from JB and the Moonshine Band. The Texas-based band release hit 3,000 copies sold their first week out, to give them their first ever appearance on this chart. The soundtrack from Footloosere-entered the charts this week at #6 with 10,000 fans deciding to buy the album to the film now that you can also buy the DVD/Blu-ray of the film. Taylor Swift’s Speak Now slides down the charts a little more this week but still is well over the 4x platinum mark. Scotty’s idol runner-up Lauren Alaina scored an uptick in albums sold thanks to her appearance on the show to sing “Georgia Peaches,” her biggest hit yet. She’s now sold over 258,000 copies of Wildflower.
Other notable albums not charted include Four The Record from Miranda Lambert (10,000 sold), Emotional Traffic from Tim McGraw (8,000), Dierks Bentley’s Home – the title track is the #1 single on this week’s radio charts (9,000), and Gary Allan’s debut with Icon. It is the latest in the UMG series and it scored him 3,000 copies sold in the first week. A couple other Notable ICON albums are releases from Josh Turner (154,000 sold), Billy Currington (148,000 sold) and a pair of George Strait Icon releases, the single disc version (109,000 sold) and the double disc version (25,000 sold).
Top Five Country Albums for This Week with Six Notable Albums (SoundScan Top 200 Current Albums Chart Placement)*
#4 – Lady Antebellum – Own The Night 108k (1,494,000)
#8 – Luke Bryan – Spring Break IV: Suntan City 30k (30,000)
#15 – Luke Bryan – tailgates & tanlines 18k (831,000)
#19 – Jason Aldean – My Kinda Party 16k (2,421,000)
#23 – Eric Church – Chief 13k (634,000)
#23 – Soundtrack – Footloose OST – 10k (135,000)
#51 – Scotty McCreery – Clear As Day 10k (958,000)
#34 – Taylor Swift – Speak Now 7k (4,027,000)
#45 – Lauren Alaina –Wildflower 4k (4,034,000)
#153 – JB and the Moonshine Band – Beer For Breakfast 3K (3,000)
Next week, we’ll see how the chart fares with no more 25¢ sales expected to hit (they stopped yesterday) and if Family Man from Shooter Jennings is able to hit the chart.
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