But next week, another Idol winner will be back on the BillBoard charts (his final sales numbers will come out the week of the 22nd). Yes, "Christmas with Scotty McCreery" will be released October 16 and at its worst is going to sell well, and at its best is going to sell phenomenally. I have been watching the discussion on Idol Forums and see a wide range of estimates of how well it will sell. I believe many of these same people were guessing Scotty may sell 50K to 100K his first week with "Clear As Day", and he ended up beating just about everybody's estimates. Someone from the "Flop of the Pops" forum posted a first week estimate of 75K for his album, and if that holds true, he should probably sell 200K to 500K over the Christmas season which would be quite a successful holiday release. I, however, having tracked his EP and album sales over the past 16 months have learned to never underestimate Scotty's sales potential. With his nonstop touring with Brad Paisley to 10,000+ seat audiences across the country, I do not think he will be able to pursue full time studies at NCSU any time soon. Sorry Scotty, UMG Nashville wants you to keep recording albums and making them piles of money.
The next curious question is when will we hear anything about album releases for the Season 11 Idols? By this time last year, Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina had both released albums and we knew James Durbin's was coming out in November. Right now we have no specifics about Phillip Phillips or Jessica Sanchez's albums except rough times for releases. By this time last year Scotty had already sold 285K albums and Lauren had sold 69K (over 350K together), and they were #1 and #2 on the country album chart. So far nobody from Season 11 has sold anything except for the EP's released in July and Phillip's downloads of his "Home" single. Are the folks at Interscope asleep? I thought they wanted to make money off these artists.