To prove you do not need to be named Kelly or Carrie to be a female American Idol winner with a big selling album, Fantasia starts off with
91K in sales to end up #2 on the overall album chart, behind only Michael Buble with her "Side Effects of You" album. She makes the fifth Idol to be on the chart this week. I placed her as the red square at #2 on my chart above, as winners #1, #4 and #11 are all clustered in the 40's. Kelly Clarkson's "Greatest Hits" is the dark purple line at #43 (8K for 398K total), Phillip Phillips' "World From the Side of the Moon" is the orange line at #44 (8K for 853K total) and Carrie Underwood's "Blown Away" is the blue line at #48 (8K for 1.420 million total). The only other Idol on the chart is Season 11 7th place finisher Colton Dixon's "A Messenger" (green line) at #138 with 3K in sales to bring his total to 95,000 units.
HitsDailyDouble does has an
early estimate of sales for Jessica Sanchez's "You, Me & The Music" at 15K to 17K in first week sales. Hopefully her sales will increase after her "Glee" appearance since a 17K first week number would be the lowest for an Idol runner-up ever, substantially lower than the 47K for Diana DeGarmo's "Blue Skies" back in 2004 or the 58K for Season 9's Crystal Bowersox's "Farmer's Daughter" back in December 2010. Season 10's Lauren Alaina had even better first week sales at 69K, helped by promotion she had with her season's popular winner, Scotty McCreery. Jessica's 17K figure is even behind the 22K opening number for Colton Dixon's album which has continued to have sustained sales 12 weeks after release. Hopefully Jessica can also have some sustained sales once her single hits the radio and she has more promotion for her album.
