Since USA Today's Idol Chatter did not post any album sales numbers this week, I will have to be happy with just the BillBoard listings, which luckily were summarized on a post at MJ's BigBlog. It appears that Phillip Phillips' EP (blue line) has finally fallen off the BillBoard Top 200, so that the only two Idols left on the chart are Carrie Underwood's "Blown Away" (orange line) and Kelly Clarkson's "Stronger" (maroon line). The green line on my graph is Scotty McCreery's "Clear As Day" which has been off the Top 200 for several weeks now, but which now has a full 52 data points covering a full year! That is actually when I started this BillBoard chart and he actually came very close to staying on for the full 52 weeks. Kelly only has 3 more weeks to go now, and I believe she will stay on for the full 52 weeks.
The funny thing about Kelly is that she is actually about to release another album, even while her current one is still selling pretty well almost a year after its release (and just being certified platinum too). She is releasing a greatest hits offering on November 16 and a new single, "Catch My Breath". And she may have won Idol over a decade ago, but she still looks pretty good too.
A sooner release (less than two weeks from now), however, is "Christmas With Scotty McCreery" which now has song snippets on its Amazon page. My guess is his album is going to sell pretty well and the snippets sound pretty good with a pleasant variety of styles to them. I am not sure why people always said Scotty always sounded the same, since he definitely did not on "Clear As Day", and he is even more stylistically varied here on a Christmas album, even though all the tracks definitely sound country. Just listening to his song snippets makes me smile, but I bet they make Jimmy Iovine and the executives at Interscope and UMG Nashville smile even more!