On another note I again checked iTunes looking for the song snippets for "Clear As Day" or "Wildflower". There is still nothing there anywhere. How disappointing!
Weekly Season 10 Download Numbers
On another note I again checked iTunes looking for the song snippets for "Clear As Day" or "Wildflower". There is still nothing there anywhere. How disappointing!
No, iTunes, you ADD previews, not take them away!
I checked a bunch of other on-line retailers and none of them have sound samples for either album:
WalMart.com: Both albums are available for $11.88, and "Clear As Day" is available as both a regular CD and the special "ZinePack" for $14.88. "Wildflower" does not have a track listing posted yet, and this is from the company that sold their EP's! Between the two of them they sold over 250,000 EP's for Walmart (that's $1,250,000) and they cannot even list the tracks on the albums and have preview clips.
Target.com: "Clear As Day" is $13.99 there without even a track listing and they do not even have 'Wildflower" listed. I guess they do not plan on selling very many.
Barnes & Noble: "Clear As Day" is on sale for $9.83 and it does have a track listing, but of course no clips. "Wildflower" is $11.42 without a track listing.
Best Buy: "Clear As Day" is on sale for $9.99 without a track listing or clips. "Wildflower" is $11.99 and it does not even have album art!
FYE: They have both standard prices and "member" prices for their music. "Clear as Day" and "Wildflower" are both $10.79 for members and $11.99 for non-members. That alone makes me not want to buy anything there. I know my son once received a gift certificate for FYE, but I was not overly impressed with the place.
CDUniverse: CDUniverse actually had "Clear As Day" on their front page, on sale for $12.74. However, for such prominent placement the site does not even have a track listing for the album. "Wildflower" is also priced at $12.74.
DeepDiscount: They have "Clear As Day" listed as a Deal Grabber for $10.99. They offer free shipping for sales over $15, so if you also buy "Wildflower" here for $12.82 that would be both albums for $23.81 including shipping and tax-free. That is not a bad deal!
I will personally probably purchase "Clear As Day" on Tuesday from Amazon as an MP3 album for $9.49. I may purchase "Wildflower" there eventually too if I can ever actually find it as an MP3 album there and hear the preview tracks. Funny how that works isn't it?
Scotty's EP Hangs in BillBoard 200 One Last Week
This marks the final week of Season 10 EP sales remaining in the BillBoard Top 200 as Scotty McCreery's EP sells 3,000 more units (185,000 total) to hold on to position #187. Lauren Alaina's EP sells 2,000 more (79,000 total) and falls off the chart, having stayed in the top 200 for an impressive 12 weeks. It looks like Scotty will only beat that number by one week, but his new album, "Clear As Day", should debut very well on October 4.
Since Scotty's iTunes samples were released last Thursday, hopefully tomorrow we can finally hear the clips for Lauren Alaina's "Wildflower". Scotty actually had 3 of the 12 tracks from his album "available" for people to hear ("I Love You This Big", "The Trouble With Girls", and the leaked "Out of Summertime") but so far for Lauren the only track from the album to be heard has been "Like My Mother Does". It will be good to hear how she sounds on the other 11 tracks on her album. The first review on her album I have seen has been very positive.
The Backyardigans
The Backyardigans is a Canadian/American 3-D CGI-Cartoon children's TV series. It features five animal children, who imagine that their backyard becomes an adventure place. It is a coproduction of Treehouse TV, and the Canadian animation studio Nelvana.
The Backyardigans
The Backyardigans Television Cartoon Series
The Backyardigans Cartoon Pictures
The BackyardigansThe Backyardigans Television Cartoon SeriesThe Backyardigans Cartoon PicturesSeason 10 Idols EP's Drop Out of BillBoard Top 100
The September 14 Idol Chatter post explains in an update:
the EPs were limited editions designed to sell through before the Idol acts released their full albums. "The objective was to have virtually no inventory on these EPs by the time we released their debut albums," I was told. "The decay we saw this week, and will see in the weeks to follow, was natural and expected based on limited inventory in the U.S. Walmart locations." So if you were thinking about getting one of these EPs, better get it now, because they're not going to get any easier to find.
I will have to see if I have any numbers worth actually posting next Wednesday, but it has been a fun 12 weeks watching the sales of these EP's. Soon in October I will be able to track Scotty and Lauren's REAL album sales. Now that will be even more interesting.
As for singles downloads both "I Love You This Big" and "The Trouble With Girls" dropped in the number of downloads this week to be about 12,000 each (24,000 combined). "Like My Mother Does" also dropped to 5,000 this week. It is amazing how well ILYTB keeps selling but disappointing that TTWG is not taking off more (as well as not getting more airplay.) Once Scotty returns from the Phillipines and does more promotion hopefully things will pick up going into the album release. I do wonder, however, how many people will download the single with the album so close to being released.
"Clear As Day" Available on iTunes, but Who Cares?
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.
Barbie Princess Charm School
Barbie Princess Charm School
Barbie Princess Charm School Movie
Barbie Princess Charm School WallpaperAmerican Idol Season 10 EP Sales Week 11
Well, it seems that Scotty McCreery's sales are not immune from reality after all, and his EP sales finally dropped out of BillBoard's Top 50 to land at #51 after 10 straight weeks within the top 31. He sold 8,000 more copies this past week to bring his total up to 178,000 just 3 weeks before his new studio album, "Clear As Day", is released. However, at #51 he is still higher than any of the other Season 10 Idols have charted since week 3. The only other EP in the top 200 is Lauren Alaina's whose sales dropped to 3,000 this week to put her total sales at 74,000 with a BillBoard placement of #148. With the national tour completed sales should continue to fall especially with both Scotty's and Lauren's fans probably choosing to pre-order their upcoming full albums instead of buying a $5 EP of cover songs.
I went back to all the old Idol Chatter weekly postings with track sales to build a pretty graph of "I Love You This Big" (ILYTB) and "Like My Mother Does" (LMMD) sales and added "The Trouble With Girls" (TTWG) to the chart. I also added in Pia's "This Time" (TT in green) which has had very erratic sales peaks which then disappear. Her last numbers were from the August 17 Idol Chatter where it listed she had 15,000 downloads. Since then the track sales postings have not mentioned her. The August 24 posting lists some songs with sales of 2,000, so does that mean "This Time" went from 15K to less than 2K in one week? I cannot imagine she has sold so few downloads in the past few weeks to register while Scotty continues to sell nearly 20K copies per week of ILYTB and Lauren sells 6K weekly of LMMD. Scotty has now sold over 40,000 downloads for the past two weeks when you combine ILYTB and TTWG sales (43K last week, 44K this week.) The only two weeks when he sold more than 40,000 downloads per week previously were on the first two weeks after ILYTB was released.
Lauren Alaina "Wildflower" Cover Art
UMG Nashville just released the cover art for Lauren Alaina's upcoming album, "Wildflower", and it was nothing like I had expected. She looks lovely, but she looks so sad and serious. It does not seem to portray the Lauren Alaina from the American Idol show, or from the tour (in any video she is always smiling and cheerful.) Scotty McCreery's cover art for "Clear As Day" is not perfect either (it is difficult to read the name of the album!), but at least he still looks like the same boy on the show, and the photograph is quite flattering.
I know this posting did not have any numbers or graphs, so how about some pre-order numbers for the albums? Right now at walmart.com, "Clear As Day" is ranked #2 on pre-orders and "Wildflower" is #7, both priced at $10.88 there. On Amazon.com "Clear As Day" is #39 for all music and #7 for country at a price of $13.18. "Wildflower" is #199 for all music and #33 in country at $14.34. Amazon sure has some weird pricing on albums! Why does "Wildflower" cost $1.16 more than "Clear As Day" there? At CDUniverse.com they are both $12.74, and at DeepDiscount.com, they are both $14.18 (some "deep" discount!) BestBuy.com wants $14.99 for "Clear As Day" and they do not even have "Wildflower" listed yet. Best Buy even charges $9.99 for the 5 song EP's that sell for $5.00 at Wal-Mart. Who would buy their music from them?
Haley Reinhart and James Durbin Fall Off BillBoard 200, but Scotty keeps on selling...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)