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.
