Carrie Underwood
storms onto the BillBoard charts with her third consecutive #1 BillBoard 200 album, "Blown Away" opening up with 267,000 in sales (and her fourth consecutive #1 country album). Unbelievably that is her lowest first week sales number with 315K for "Some Hearts" (2005), 527K for "Carnival Ride" (2007), and 318K for "Play On" (2009). That lower number reflects more the overall state of album sales in 2012 than Carrie's star power which is definitely still flying high. "Blown Away" will likely be her fourth consecutive platinum album and has a good chance of achieving double platinum as all her other albums have reached.
I am not sure if the other country Idols are being helped by Carrie's press, but Scotty McCreery, Lauren Alaina and Kellie Pickler all saw nice sales increases this week. Scotty's "Clear As Day" sold yet another 6K to put his total sales at 1.041M and place him at #70 on the chart. Lauren and Kellie did not make the charts, but with 2K in sales Lauren's "Wildflower" is up to 276K in sales and Kellie's "100 Proof" gained another thousand to reach 70K in sales. The other Kelly, Kelly Clarkson, had another solid week of sales of "Stronger", adding another 10K in sales to add up to 776K and staying in the top 50 at #46 on the charts. Daughtry's "Break the Spell" also remains in the Top 200 at #157 with sales of 3K (437K total).
Adding Carrie to my chart of recent American Idol sales puts her close to Lauren's total already. Her total sales will probably reach Daughtry's in a few weeks and then catch up with Kelly and then eventually with Scotty. It will be interesting in upcoming weeks to see how well Adam, Haley or Kris will do on their first weeks.
