With
preliminary estimates of iTunes downloads for Scotty McCreery's "I Love You This Big" and Lauren Alaina's "Like My Mother Does" being projected, it appears Season 10 of American Idol may bring back improved sales for its winners. With estimates of 180,000 for McCreery and 140,000 for Alaina they will easily top the winners of Season 9 (Lee DeWyze with 95,000 and Crystal Bowersox with 49,000) and also Season 8 (Kris Allen with 134,000 and Adam Lambert with 115,000.) It is interesting to note that Lauren's sales should surpass the sales of all the Season 8 and 9 winners and runners up, and Scotty's sales will also surpass David Archuleta's first week sales (166,000) although not quite match the success of David Cook (236,000). Both tracks are also doing
fairly well with airplay, and hopefully that is a sign of good things to come for both contestants. For fun I added the
first week sales numbers of their albums (in red) to the first week singles of their coronation songs for the last three season winners:
It is interesting to note that for everyone except Kris Allen and Lee DeWyze, every contestant has sold more on the first week of their albums than their first week of their first single. Hopefully Scotty and Lauren will continue with the trends of all the other winners and not like the trends of Kris or Lee. The top increase was for Adam Lambert whose first week album sales of 198,000 was over 80,000 more than his first week single sales (over 70% more.) David Cook, David Archuleta and Crystal Bowersox all saw their album sales increase 10% to 20%
over their singles sales so if the same trend happens for Scotty and Lauren they could see first week album sales of 200,000 to 220,000 and 155,000 to 180,000 respectively.
