American Idol Season 10 Track Download Numbers - The Week after

Now that it has been a week since Lauren Alaina's "Wildflower" album release we can see the download sales for both Lauren and Scotty without one of them releasing an album. I believe the release of both albums helped both of their download sales for those weeks. This week both Lauren and Scotty only have two tracks each listed on Brian's Idol Track Chart for the week. Scotty has "I Love You This Big" and "The Trouble With Girls", both with sales of 9,000 (although since ILTYB is listed first I am guessing it had more sales. Lauren's two listed tracks are "Like My Mother Does" with 9,000 (listed between ILYTB and TTWG so I am guessing the sales for the week was ILYTB > LMMD > TTWG) and her new popular album track, "Dirt Road Prayer", with 4,000 downloads (21,000 total in two weeks.) I updated my graph so that the total "Scotty" tally is 18,000 for the week from his two tracks and 13,000 for Lauren with hers.

I noticed that Brian's article this week did not have the total for LMMD but since last week's total was 305K, I am guessing she must now be at 314K. Scotty's total with ILYTB has now reached 654K and TTWG has broken the 100K barrier to hit 105K giving him 759K in downloads from his first two singles so far. Together they have sold well over a million downloads now.

Two more interesting numbers in Brian's latest article were the latest sales numbers for both Lauren and Scotty's EP's released in July. I had not seen those in about a month so I added those to my old EP sales graph. In the past month both EP's have sold another 6,000 units, putting Scotty's up to 191,000 and Lauren's at 85,000. What is startling is how close those two numbers are to their first week sales for each of them. Another way to look at these two numbers is to show how many total albums each of them has sold, Scotty has 191K + 342K = 533K units sold and Lauren has 85K + 95K = 180K. Or if we add them up monetarily as a $5 EP or a $10 album:

Scotty = $5 x 191K + $10 x 342K = $4.375M
Lauren = $5 x 85K + $10 x 95K = $1.375M

Added together that is $5.75 million the two of them have sold! And I am not even considering the track downloads of over $1 million. Wow. Someone over at UMG Mercury is getting a big bonus this year! (Meanwhile Scotty is still eating off the dollar menu at the Garner McDonalds...)

Idol Seaon 10 Album Sales Numbers - October 26, 2011

I was hoping on having the single download numbers today, but Brian at Idol Chatter has not released them yet, so I can at least post my finalized graph of 3 week album sales results for the past 3 years of Idol. From Roughstock.com's exact numbers, Scotty McCreery's "Clear As Day" sold 57K more this past week to total 342K after three weeks, and Lauren Alaina's "Wildflower" sold 26K more to give her 95K albums sold in her first two weeks. I was able to retrieve numbers for both Season 8 and Season 9 to add Kris Allen, Adam Lambert, Lee DeWyze and Crystal Bowersox's first three weeks of sales to compare to the two latest Idol winners. One thing I noticed is that Lauren and Crystal continue to track very similar numbers, but I do not think that will last long since Lauren is already scheduled for some high profile country performances heading into the holidays which are bound to push her sales higher than Crystal's. Plus Crystal's early sales were boosted by the holiday season last December whereas Lauren has time to promote her single and album before the big holiday season kicks in. The other interesting comparison is between Scotty and Adam Lambert's "For Your Entertainment", which started out with very similar opening weeks, but now Scotty is selling substantially faster. With Adam being helped by a holiday boost in his early sales, this is also good news for Scotty's sales, since Adam's album actually sold quite well (over 800K in total sales)!


HitsDailyDouble has its preliminary debut numbers for next week out, and they currently have Kelly Clarkson's "Stronger" estimated to sell 155K to 165K which is very similar to Scotty's original estimates the Wednesday after "Clear As Day" was released. Perhaps Kelly will also be lucky like Scotty was and surpass the estimates by a good margin. Nevertheless that is a pretty strong number for Kelly which will probably end up being another gold certification (if not platinum) for her. She should easily be #2 on the Billboard chart behind Coldplay. I also noticed that Toby Keith's new album, "Clancy's Tavern" is estimated to sell 50K to 60K. That should be good enough to put him at #1 on the country chart, but Scotty may come fairly close, depending how much his sales drop and how accurate Toby's estimates are to reality.

Hits Daily Double Predicts Solid Sales for Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina for Next Week

As posted on MJ's blog, Hits Daily Double is predicting that "Clear As Day" will sell 60K to 65K for its third week and 'Wildflower" will sell 28K to 30K for its second week. That would give Scotty his third consecutive #1 BillBoard country album raking and Lauren would fall from #2 to #3 on the country chart behind Lady Antebellum's "Own the Night". Scotty would actually rise on the overall Billboard chart from #4 to #3 and Lauren should remain in the Top 10. That will put Scotty's 3 week total for "Clear As Day" at almost 350K and Lauren's two week total for "Wildflower" at 100K. Lauren's album sales are currently tracking just slightly higher than Crystal Bowersox did last year, but she with more radio airplay and scheduled TV appearances she should be able to maintain a better profile heading into the holiday season. With Lauren's Ellen performance today and Scotty's new video also being released today, there is no shortage of current publicity for both of them so their sales should continue to increase. They should have combined album sales over the 500K point by next week for sure, something Lee and Crystal never achieved.

No, Jose, Scotty McCreery just keeps getting more press!

 Wow, I heard Scotty McCreery sing the National Anthem before the World Series last night (Hurray Cardinals!) and I thought he did a terrific job once he finally received a working microphone. But now some people are saying he flubbed it saying "No Jose does that..." instead of "oh, say does that" and I sure did not hear that. So I had to go listen yet again to one of the billion videos of him singing it and I thought, "wow, if this isn't the most brilliant marketing idea ever!" Here we now have a bunch of people who may had forgotten about Scotty from Idol, but now they are all listening to him sing the "Star Spangled Banner" almost perfectly. Plus those same people have to read anonymous comments insulting an 18 year old clean cut, country boy about how he "flubbed" our anthem when all he did was add the "n" consonant sound to the beginning of one word (which many people simply attribute to his Carolina accent). As they often say "there is no such thing as bad publicity" and all this does is put Scotty McCreery more in the news, especially on the same morning when it is announced he will be performing at the CMA awards next month. I could even see some Southern country fans taking offense of those "snooty yankees" making fun of his accent and maybe going out and helping a fellow Southerner out by buying a song on iTunes or picking up a copy of his album. Especially once they hear his voice and think, "oh yeah, I voted for him on Idol and he sounds pretty good. I should go check out that #1 country album of his".

Here are a few of the many YouTube clips of his performance :

American Idol Season 10 Download Stats after both Album Releases

Now that Lauren Alaina's "Wildflower" album has been released we can see how many people decided to download specific songs from the album. Just like with Scotty McCreery's "Clear As Day" release last week there are six tracks from her new album which show up on the Idol Chatter download track sales list. But unlike Scotty whose download sales are led by his two radio singles, Lauren's top seller was "Dirt Road Prayer" which sold 17,000, outselling not only Lauren's single "Like My Mother Does" (15,000), but also both of Scotty's tracks on the list, "I Love You This Big" (14,000) and "The Trouble With Girls" (11,000). In fact the total of Lauren's six tracks on the list this week almost exactly matches the total sold by Scotty's top six tracks last week, about 50,000 downloads. Besides "Dirt Road Prayer" and "Like My Mother Does", the other four tracks from "Wildflower" appearing on the list are: "The Middle" (6,000), "One of Those Boys" (5,000), "Georgia Peaches" (4,000) and "She's a Wildflower" (3,000). So even though Lauren's album sales are not as high as Scotty's, her download sales on her debut week are fairly equivalent. It will be interesting to see how their sales continue from this point forward now that the "debut" buzz will be diminishing.

Scotty and Lauren in BillBoard Top 5 overall, #1 and #2 in Country

As expected Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina ended up #1 and #2 on the BillBoard country charts this week, with the only question being who would be #1 and who would be #2. Once again Scotty ended up in front with another 88,000 in sales (down only 55%) to bring his two week total to an impressive 285,000 units. That is almost twice the combined two week totals of both of last year's winner and runner-up (Lee DeWyze with 53,000 in two weeks and Crystal Bowersox with 96,000 or 149,000 combined.) Lauren sold 69,000 units which also bests both of the first week sales for Lee (39,000) and Crystal (58,000), and with a second single, "Georgia Peaches", being released to radio next week, her sales should continue to improve, especially going into the holiday shopping season.

I was actually expecting Lauren to sell more following the trends of previous Idol winners and runners up since only Kris Allen and Lee DeWyze had previously sold more in first week single downloads than in first week album sales since Season 7. Nonetheless in today's market her 69,000 in sales puts her ahead of country stars like Martina McBride who debuted with only 40,000 units this week.

So in two weeks Mercury Nashville has twice led the Billboard country charts (#1 last week and #1 and #2 this week) selling a total of 354,000 albums from their two American Idol singers. I can definitely see Scotty going gold before the end of the year, and Lauren has a good chance of breaking 200K or 300K by then as well with some good singles and promotion. Let's see if the two of them combined can break 1 million units by the end of 2011.

Season 10 Song Download Numbers - "Clear As Day" release week

I was curious how many song downloads Scotty McCreery would receive on the same week as "Clear As Day" was released, so I was happy to see Brian Mansfield at USA Today finally posted them this morning. Not only did "I Love You This Big" and "The Trouble With Girls" receive large boosts in download sales (ILYTB up 108%  with 18,000 downloads and TTWG up 143% with 12,000), but so did four other tracks on the album, "Out of Summertime" with 8,000 downloads, "Water Tower Town" with 5,000, "You Make That Look Good" with 4,000 and "Clear As Day" with 4,000. If you add up the totals for all six of those tracks that adds up to 51K downloads so I replaced the line on my graph that was the sum of ILYTB and TTWG with the sales all the other listed tracks. In reality the other 6 songs on the album probably account for another 10,000 to 20,000 more downloads, but it is hard to predict how their sales tailed off.

Lauren Alaina's "Like My Mother Does" also had a nice 32% increase to 6,000 downloads and will probably increase again this coming week with her album release. Checking iTunes rankings it is interesting to see how her song sales rankings are shaping up, since neither LMMD nor her new single "Georgia Peaches" tops her song popularity. The far leader for her is the last song on the album, the intimate "Dirt Road Prayer" which I have to admit is a pretty impressive song. I definitely think she sounds best on the album with the slower songs that are not so overproduced, but that she needed a more up-tempo song to be her next single, so "Georgia Peaches" is a good pick. However, right now GP is only the 7th most popular track on her album on iTunes.  I found it interesting that HitsDailyDouble currently has her estimated sales to be 60 to 65K for next week, since that sounds a bit low to me (Crystal debuted with 58K, but that was in December). I am guessing by tomorrow they will readjust Lauren's sales numbers higher to 70 to 75K and she will end up closer to 80K or 90K. I can not believe Scotty will end up selling more than twice her first week sales but that is now likely to happen. That will make it very close next week to see who is #1 and #2 on the country charts. It is definitely too close to call.

Scotty and Lauren's Albums show the Real winner of American Idol Season 10 is....

Scotty McCreery's #1 BillBoard sales of 197,000 for "Clear As Day" were just announced and after listening to Lauren Alaina's new album, "Wildflower" (only $7.99 at Amazon.com!), I can easily see who has won American Idol Season 10. No, I am not going to say it was Lauren, and I am not going to say it is Scotty either. The winner is obviously UMG Mercury Nashville records who will most likely end up with two #1 Billboard Country albums from two very malleable and marketable teen country stars. People may have complained about having two teen country idols, but after hearing both albums they each definitely lean in two different directions. Scotty's "Clear As Day" has a very "modern traditional" sound that will appeal to a lot of people who prefer more traditional country music (especially older folks who actually buy physical CD's and do not download illegally from file sharing sites.) Lauren's "Wildflower" leans much more to a pop radio country sound which will appeal to not only to the younger country crowd but also with more crossover interest from the broader pop market. I think her album sounds very good, and I was never a big fan of her during Idol. I think it will most likely outsell Scotty's second week sales (and Martina McBride) to hit #1 on the country charts. My least favorite part of the "Wildflower" CD is the cover art, which I think portrays the album even less now after I have heard it in its entirety. I am guessing next week she will break 100K, and Scotty will be slightly under, but in any case it's a win-win scenario for UMG Nashville. I do not think they really care who is the #1 and who is the #2 country album next week as long as  they are both their artists!

Scotty's a Hit! Let the Scalping Begin!

Did you wonder who all was buying up all those "limited edition" $14.88 ZinePaks of Scotty McCreery's "Clear As Day" from Wal-Mart that were limited to just 80,000 units produced? Well, it seems that besides the rabid fans there were also some entrepreneurs across the country who bought them up and are now reselling them on Amazon and eBay. It looks like the going price online is about $25 so people are looking to earn a $10 profit on each unit especially now that "Clear As Day" looks like it will be a hit (BillBoard now projects a #1 ranking with 160,000 to 170,000 in first day sales.) With every success there are always folks trying to capitalize, and they are taking advantage of the opportunity. With many Wal-Mart stores apparently sold out of the ZinePaks, and with international fans without access to a Wal-Mart and who can not order online via Walmart.com, places like Amazon and eBay are the only choices for some folks.

The other great Season 10 Idol news is that Lauren Alaina has announced a new single release, "Georgia Peaches", which will be released to radio on October 24 and will be available for download next Tuesday (October 11) when the "Wildflower" CD releases. That means for her upcoming promotional performances next week she will not be forced to perform "Like My Mother Does" anymore! I am sure glad I was able to hear the 2 minute clip from RateTheMusic since iTunes still does not have 90 second clips of her album on-line yet. I did find a YouTube video of her performing it live from last weekend, but frankly that is still clipped and the live recording does not sounds nearly as good as the studio version:


You can always listen to the 30 second Amazon clip, and someone posted a video for the four RateTheMusic clips. I am looking forward to hearing the whole thing next week. I noticed even going from the 90 second iTunes clips for Scotty's songs you miss a lot of the build up when compared to the full tracks. I sure wish Scotty's second single had been an up-tempo number like "Georgia Peaches".

Now that "Clear As Day" is projected to have such good numbers it will be very interesting to see who ends up #1 and #2 on the country charts next week. Not only will Scotty and Lauren be running against each other, but Martina McBride and Hunter Hayes will be debuting that week as well. That will be a fun little competition to watch.

Barbie Rapunzel

Barbie as Rapunzel as Barbie film series of computer animated Barbie films. The story is being told by Barbie to her little sister Kelly, who does not have confidence in her painting abilities.

Rapunzel lives as a servant to the witch Gothel, who resides in a manor isolated in the woods. She grows up believing that Gothel saved her from abandonment as an infant. Rapunzel finds companionship in Penelope, an outgoing dragon, and Hobie, a worrisome rabbit. Rapunzel spends what free time she has painting.

Barbie Rapunzel

Barbie Rapunzel Image

Barbie Rapunzel Picture

Barbie Rapunzel Wallpaper

Weekly Download numbers and the first 'Clear As Day' Sales Projections

Today's sales projections for "Clear As Day" are out, but first it is time to report this weeks downloads for Scotty and Lauren. Sales for all three released singles continue to fall, but look for Scotty's numbers to shoot up for next week since a bunch of the tracks from "Clear As Day" are moving up the charts, especially "Out of Summertime", and the song that never dies, "I Love You This Big". ILYTB still sold 9,000 copies this week (612K total), substantially more than the 5,000 for "The Trouble With Girls" (74K total) and the 4,000 for "Like My Mother Does" (284K total).

And the Hits Daily Double projections for Scotty are looking pretty good, 150,000 to 175,000 easily giving him a #1 BillBoard album. Wow. With his fanatic fans I am guessing he will end up on the high end of that so I am putting 175,000 in my chart so I can make a projection myself:

Since Lauren has been consistently selling 50% to 70% of Scotty's sales, if he breaks 175K I can see her selling over 100K herself. If he ends up closer to 150K,  I can see her not quite reaching 100K, but probably still outselling Crystal's first week of 58K last year. So far she has not been getting as much promotion as Scotty and it appears that she may be forced to sing "Like My Mother Does" when she performs on TV instead of one of the better songs off her album. That is really a shame. They still do not have the 90 second previews of her songs on iTunes which continues to tick me off! Her release date is now less than a week away people!!

Music versus Gasoline prices over the decades...

Today I did the proper thing and purchased a copy of Scotty McCreery's debut album "Clear As Day" to put on my MP3 player. I chose to download it from Amazon MP3 and I was surprised to see they lowered the price even lower than it had been just a day or two ago so today it cost me a whopping $8.99 to download. It just took a few clicks of the mouse and the music was downloaded to my PC and then I could transfer it to my MP3 player (not an iPod!) That sure beat driving over to the local Wal-Mart or Target to purchase a real CD where I would need to deal with traffic, parking, unruly customers, and paying tax. But that made me think that I just purchased 12 songs and 40 minutes of entertainment for less than the price of three gallons of gasoline. Music has become such an inexpensive form of entertainment people compared to when I was young. I remember albums actually costing more than my piddly $8.99 decades ago when I was a kid, so I thought I had to find some hard data on how much music cost in the past compared to now. I found this good article which has a pretty graph, which of course what I needed on this numbers related blog! That sounded right since I remember spending about $15 to buy my brothers and friends albums for their birthdays and that was a lot of money for a young kid back in the 1970's and 1980's! I also remember purchasing our first CD player in 1985 and purchasing Whitney Houston's first CD for about $20. Why is it that our youth are not willing to spend half that to purchase a music download of their favorite artist? Is it really better to go to file sharing sites and spend countless hours downloading music illegally for free and not supporting your favorite artists? All to save a few measly bucks that would barely pay for their lunch at school.

My next goal was to find some historical gasoline prices and I found those easily enough, with a lovely graph on this site. So while music prices have actually fallen since when I was a child, gasoline prices have increased substantially. From 1979 through the 1980's gasoline stayed below $1.50 a gallon and was about $1.25 in St. Louis in 1985, so to pay for my first Whitney Houston CD (yes, I'll admit I purchased it!) it cost me over 15 gallons of gasoline, or a full tank of our Toyota Camry back then. My Scotty McCreery purchase today would not even cover three gallons of gas so that is a 5 fold difference if you consider the album to gasoline ratio.

People today have to realize how inexpensive music is to purchase these day and just buy it!

As for Scotty's album, "Clear As Say", it has been #1 on iTunes all day long and #3 at Amazon. I am guessing tomorrow's sales preliminary predictions will put it somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000, but you never know. HitsDailyDouble is putting J. Cole at 217K for this week with Blink-182 at 155K and Adele at 117K so depending how much their numbers fall for next week they may still be battling Scotty for #1 on the BillBoard overall chart next week (Adele's numbers are incredibly stable.) However he should safely land at #1 on the Country chart unless the Hank Williams Sr album does really, really well.

Still Waiting for iTunes 'Wildflower' Snippets

I am happy to report that Amazon MP3 beat iTunes in something this weekend, releasing samples of Lauren Alaina's debut album "Wildflower". Unfortunately these are only 30 second snippets compared to the 90 second previews typically available on iTunes. I checked and the previews are still not there on iTunes! I found out about four of Lauren's songs being available for review on the "Rate The Music" site, so I signed up there and was able to listen to them there. These were generous 2 minutes chunks of the songs which were really nice so that you can hear the transitions from the verses to the choruses and also the changing of dynamics throughout the songs. The 30 second chunks on Amazon just do not the songs justice and that is a shame since I was quite impressed by Lauren's vocals on the "Rate The Music" samples. The four songs they had were "Georgia Peaches", "The Middle", "Tupelo" and "She's a Wildflower". If I had to pick her next single from those four I would pick "Tupelo" which I believe displays her vocal sound very well, and my second pick would be "Georgia Peaches" which is just a very catchy tune. By listening to the Amazon tiny snippets you just cannot hear enough to decide. Come on, Amazon, I vastly prefer buying music from you over Apple, but you need longer previews! Apple gives us 300% more previews. that is, when they actually have them.

Tomorrow, Scotty McCreery releases "Clear As Day" which means on Wednesday we will get our first estimate of first week sales. One thing I've been checking is seeing if any of the popular "file sharing" sites have his album out and none of them do yet, which is a good thing.