Wow, Haley #2 on Walmart Music Best Seller's List!

 After I posted my numbers from last week on Idol pre-orders, someone actually posted a comment here that they thought Haley's  EP would outsell the others due to her YouTube hits. Well, I actually did not believe it myself, since I am not a huge believer that YouTube hits turn into sales, but perhaps the commenter was correct! As of right now (the day before release), Haley's EP is now #2 of all music orders on Walmart.com (only David Cook's "This Loud Morning" is ahead of it) which puts her ahead of all the other Idols the day before release. Here are the current music best-seller rankings at WalMart.com as of 9:00 am Monday morning:

#1 David Cook (Deluxe Version)
#2 Haley Reinhart
#3 David Cook (Standard Version)
#4 James Durbin
#5 Scotty McCreery
...
#9 Lauren Alaina

I am actually a bigger Haley fan than Scotty fan (she is the only contestant this year I mass voted for besides Lauren Turner), but I just thought due to the strength of Scotty's radio single "I Love You This Big" on country radio his EP would also sell the strongest of all the Season 10 Idols. I hope all of them do well!

Walmart EP Preliminary Sales Stats

 The Top 4 from American Idol Season 10 have their "Highlights" EP's now available for pre-order at Walmart.com and the site includes the very interesting statistics for "What Was Ultimately Purchased By People Who Viewed This Item". It shows what percentage of the people who looked at a particular page actually purchased. First I will list the numbers for each of the four pages as of right now (Thursday, June 23 at 9:20am Central time):

1) Scotty McCreery's EP page: 55% Scotty, 12% Lauren, 10% James, 10% Haley
2) Lauren Alaina's EP page: 33% Scotty, 23% Lauren, 14% James, 14% Haley
3) Haley Reinhart's EP page: 57% Haley, 15% Scotty, 12% James, 6% Lauren
4) James Durbin's EP page: 30% Scotty, 24% James, 24% Haley, 12% Lauren

The first obvious statistically abnormality is that on both Lauren and James pages, more people ended up buying Scotty's EP than the EP of the artist the page is trying to sell! So Scotty is the top seller on all the pages except Haley's where he is second. So it is pretty obvious that Scotty's EP will be the best seller of the four, but trying to rank the other 3 are a big tougher. Also interesting is that on both Scotty and Lauren's pages, Haley and James are literally tied in the number of sales. I am guessing therefore that those two will have very similar sales numbers. The big question for me is Lauren, who seems to sell higher than James and Haley on Scotty's page (who probably has the most hits of all) but who is dead last in sales on both Haley's and James's pages. However, since she has the lowest percentage of viewers on her own page that buy her own EP, I am guessing that Lauren may be the current lowest seller of all (in pre-orders at least.) Her percentage on Scotty's page is only 12% which is not that much higher than the other two. So my guess of the ranking of current pre-order sales on the four EP's is:
  1) Scotty 2) Haley 3) James 4) Lauren
And I think Haley and James will see very similar sales, and Lauren will only be slightly below them. The CD's will ship next week so sales results will not be available until the first week of July. I will be interested to see how they all do.

American Idol: The eBay Numbers

 Since I was on eBay yesterday ordering some assorted stuff for my family, I thought I would see how many items were available for the winners and runners-up of American Idol over the past several years. All I did was enter their names into the main eBay search field and looked to see how many items there were for sales for each contestant. To limit the selections I just picked the 10 latest winners and runners-up from the past five seasons. Here are the results of the numbers:

1) 2,021 = Adam Lambert
2) 1,138 = Scotty McCreery
3)  603 = David Cook
4)  312 = David Archuleta
5)  259 = Jordin Sparks
6)  290 = Kris Allen
7)  140 = Lee DeWyze
8)  109 = Blake Lewis
9)   90 = Lauren Alaina
10)   62 = Crystal Bowersox

Note that Scotty and Lauren do not have any music albums for sale which can be quite a few of the items for sale of the other Idols, all of whom have released at least one album. Here are the counts just of "Music" for the eight latest winners and runners-up:

1) 156 = Adam Lambert
2) 118 = Jordin Sparks
3) 75 = Blake Lewis
4) 70 = David Cook
5) 70 = David Archuleta
6) 40 = Lee DeWyze
7) 35 = Kris Allen
8) 20 = Crystal Bowersox

So now I can create a new graph as shown on the top of this posting, sorted by Non-Music sales, pushing Blake Lewis to the bottom because he had quite a few music selections for sale.

Adam Lambert has far and away the most items for sale on eBay, but Scotty McCreery is a very strong second place, in front of some fairly popular Idols such as Jordin Sparks, David Cook and David Archuleta from Season 7. Note that this is just a snapshot of what was for sale this morning (June 21, 2011) and these numbers should change quite a bit as new products are released (especially more music.)

Season 10 Singles Powering Up Country Charts

I was curious how well country radio would receive Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina's debut singles, "I Love You This Big" and "Like My Mother Does", and almost a month after the season finale, it looks like they are doing just fine, especially Scotty. Today's Idol Chatter has Scotty listed with a whopping 2,649 spins in the past week, putting Scotty #22 on the USA Today country chart after being out just 4 weeks and with his song still receiving new adds on country stations. If you compare this with Lee DeWyze's first single "Sweet Serendipity", the most spins that song ever received was 1260 near the end of January. Lauren's song had 559 spins this past week which is interestingly almost exactly the same number of spins that Scotty's song received the very first week it both songs were released. Her song is now gaining adds like Scotty's song has been, but hopefully once they go on tour things will pick up more for her. Scotty is #3 on the USA Today Airplay Chart which is pretty impressive for a chart dominated by Carrie, Kelly and Chris Daughtry lately.

Tarzan and Jane

Tarzan and Jane

Tarzan and Jane Disney

Jane Disney

First Week American Idol Singles Download Sales - Final Numbers

The early sales estimates of 180,000 and 140,000 were a little high, but the actual numbers of 171,000 and 121,000 are still quite respectable for Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina's debut singles "I Love You So Big" and "Like My Mother Does". That was still good enough to put them as #3 and #9 on the top selling downloads for the week. Two other telling numbers were the downloads for their American Idol compilation albums were Scotty sold 23,000 and Lauren sold 11,000, putting them at #12 and #42 on the BillBoard 200 album chart. Last year, Lee and Crystal each sold about 2,000 copies of their compilation albums on iTunes the first week which did not place them anywhere on the BillBoard charts, so this is a huge difference. In Season 8 Adam sold 16,000 and Kris sold 10,000 digital albums their first week, so Scotty and Lauren are selling even better than they did.

Interestingly there was an ad run in the May 31 BillBoard Country Update which gave slightly higher numbers than in the USA Today article (173K and 124k). Perhaps they added an extra day of sales or something.