It is only Tuesday, but with so much American Idol news of late I had to share. First off, "Christmas With Scotty McCreery" was released today and is available for download or on CD. As usual, most folks seem to be downloading it from iTunes for $10.99, but definitely not me. Why not? Because I am a cheapo and I much prefer Amazon MP3! I had a $1 promotional MP3 credit from Amazon, so with their $9.99 price I could purchase it for only $8.99. And with my collection of $5 Amazon cards from Swagbucks it cost me absolutely none of my own cash to purchase a legal download of the album. Since the iTunes version had no extra tracks or anything, I do not understand why people flock to give all their money to Apple, when I personally think Amazon MP3 is a lot easier to use. But that is just my rant! The album itself? Well, it is rather weird to be listening to Christmas music when it will be about 70 degrees outside, but Scotty sure makes it fun! Just like "Clear As Day" he has some fun, upbeat songs on here and some slower, pretty serious tracks. One of Scotty's gifts is his ability to shape each song to the right tone and emotion, to make you smile and to make you cry. He just shows so much personality on this album it is hard not to feel in the Christmas spirit. As for chart numbers, he is #18 on the overall iTunes album chart at 9:00am central time, and #24 in all CD albums on Amazon so he is doing pretty well here for his first morning of sales. Since I bet he sells a lot of hard copies of CD's at Wal-Mart and Target and such, we will have to wait for their sales numbers later. HitsDailyDouble should have a rough one day estimate by late tomorrow.
The next exciting news is that Phillip Phillips has cover art and an actual name for his album, and it is a long one, "The World From the Side of the Moon". He also has a hard release date of November 19. I knew Interscope had to release an album from him before the holiday shopping season, and he gets to release the week before Black Friday. With "Home" still going strong, and a well placed release date, his album should have some pretty good sales numbers when it comes out. The only place I currently see it for pre-order is at Target for $13.99. I think in November other retailers will pick it up for pre-order and the price will come down to $9.99 or $10.99.
The third news may explain why no Jessica Sanchez album news has been surfacing. It sounds like the Season 11 runner up will be back on television with a recurring role on Glee. I can see them waiting for until she is on Glee to first release a single from her (performed on the program, of course) and then to release her album. So we may have to wait until December or early 2013 for her album to surface.