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.