A good measure to see how popular of a seller Phillip Phillips might be is by examining how many downloads of his single, "Home", he sold at iTune his first week. Luckily for Phillip, it had a
very strong first week, selling 278,000 downloads, putting it at #2 on the digital downloads chart for the week. MJSBigBlog has a nice list of the
top 11 download sales by Idols, but I think we really need a graph to better visualize the difference, so I posted the numbers in a bar graph above. I also added in more numbers from
MJ's post from two years ago (so we at least include all the winners). It is interesting to note that following the typical "guys versus gals" subject, the top 4 selling singles are by guys, in fact, 6 of the top 7 are. The two biggest Idol selling superstars, Carrie and Kelly, are #5 and #8 on this list. Other fairly successful female winners like Fantasia and Jordin are even further down on the list.
As for Phillip's album, it about matched the number put up by Season 10 winner, Scotty McCreery, with Phillip listed at
24,000 sales (Billboard #11) and Scotty with
23,000 (BillBoard #12). What is most disturbing is Jessica Sanchez's number which is only 4,000 (#126), whereas last year's runner-up Lauren Alaina sold 11,000 (#42). In Season 9, Lee and Crystal both
only sold about 2,000 copies of their compilation albums, but they at least sold 95K and 49K of their
respective debut singles. Jessica's singles are not charting anywhere. If the folks at Interscope want Jessica to sell some downloads or albums they had better find some better, more original material for her to perform!
