"Clear As Day" Available on iTunes, but Who Cares?

You can now pre-order Scotty McCreery's debut album at iTunes, but I do not see why that is a big deal. I checked if the iTunes deal was any different than the Amazon deal and the only difference is iTunes is charging $10.99 and Amazon is charging $9.49. I have now purchased music downloads from both sites and I much prefer using Amazon. I do not understand the appeal of using iTunes and their giant bloated software. The only reason to go with iTunes is when they add extra songs or other media that is different from the other sites. Otherwise save your $1.50 and buy it from Amazon. Both contain exactly the same music, the same electronic booklet and Amazon MP3 files are much easier to deal with than having to use iTunes and their nasty software.

Now that the album release is less than two weeks away it is time to start predictions on first week sales. One number I was watching was the sales for Lady Antebellum's third album "Own The Night" which has the potential of being huge. I know there is no way that Scotty will hit their numbers, so if they had a bad opening week that would be a very bad sign on how country acts are selling this season. For example, if you guess Scotty can only possible sell half as many albums the first week as Lady Antebellum, if they only sold 120,000 units that would have been bad news for Scotty. Early predictions from BillBoard, however, had Lady Antebellum's sales at 260,000 to 290,000 and now HitsDailyDouble is estimating a whopping 354,000 units. If we use them as an upper bound for sales for Scotty, the higher the better. Since their actual sales are 20% higher than BillBoard predictions that is a good sign for country music sales right now in general, so it is good news for Scotty and Lauren.