Sales Chart—Music Biz's Fickle Mistress

Highlights:
• Cupid helped Country music sales jump a respectable 25% from last week, but remain down 16.5% YTD
• Thompson Square and Jana Kramer had notable debuts
• Lady Gaga, Lady A and Mumford and Sons got digital download bumps from the Grammys
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Valentine’s Day shoppers wooed the music biz with a one-week rendezvous, but the romance is fleeting for SoundScan watchers eyeing the big picture. All-genre album sales are up 17% (6.4 million) over last week, but the YTD tally is down 14.9%.
Cupid helped Country music sales jump a respectable 25% from last week to a total of 814K. But YTD Country album sales are down 16.5%, having sold only 4 million units in 2011. One bright spot is that digital album sales are up 11.3% over 2010.
Real-life country couple Thompson Square (Stoney Creek) felt the love when its first album debuted at No. 3 on the Country charts with 30K, including 16% digital. Jana Kramer may be new to music, but the actress reaped rewards by debuting her song on her show One Tree Hill. It helped make the WB single “I Won’t Give Up” the highest debut on the Country tracks chart, entering at No. 6 with 40K.
Early impact from the Sunday night (2/13) Grammy Awards was digital download icing on the V-day sales cake. Fans love the instant gratification of hearing a song and turning straight to the computer. Lady Gaga debuted “Born This Way” on the Grammy telecast and it ended as the top-selling track of the week with 448K. Leading Grammy winners Lady Antebellum climbed back to the top of the Country digital tracks chart with 59K downloads of “Need You Now” (a 150% bump). Mumford and Sons’ performance helped push the band to the top of the Digital Album charts with 34K.