McCreery’s Big Grin Lifts Country Sales

David M Ross • October 26, 2011

This week’s SoundScan report is about Scotty McCreery’s big grin as he stays in the No. 1 position atop Nielsen SoundScan’s Country Current Albums list for a third consecutive week. To date he has notched impressive weekly sales of 197k, 88k and 57k for total sales of about 342k. Lovely Lauren Alaina, the Idol runner up has also made a strong showing, moving from No. 2 to No. 3 this week. After two weeks she has total sales of about 95k.

Lady Antebellum’s Own The Night, No. 2 this week, has been out for six weeks shifting a total of 687k units. (The trio’s last outing, Need You Now sold 1,285,000 in its first six weeks.)

Power duo Montgomery Gentry are back with a new album, Rebels On The Run and a new label Average Joes Entertainment. Their debut lands at No. 9 on the country list with sales of almost 12k units.

Looking at the remaining ten weeks till the end of the sales year, it is hard to predict exactly how the numbers will end up. YTD country has moved 31.18 million albums. The 2010 full year total was 43.72 million. That means we need to sell an average of 1.25 million for each of the ten weeks till year end. (This week we sold 706k.)

Number crunchers know that country album sales are YTD ahead 9.3%. (All genre is ahead 3.3%) But next week’s tally (week ending 10/30/11) will be up against a slam bam outing by Taylor Swift who sold 1.05 million units (10/31/10). Next week will be bolstered by new debuts from Toby Keith and Vince Gill, but it is unlikely they will completely offset Swift’s impact in calculating the comparison percentage. The following week’s numbers will contain Miranda Lambert’s new collection. So stay tuned.

Tracking
The top five selling country track downloads are Blake Shelton “God Gave Me You” (50k); Luke Bryan “…This Night To End” (39.5k); Band Perry “If I Die Young” (36.7k); Lady Antebellum “Just A Kiss” (35k); and Eli Young Band “Crazy Girl” (34.5k).

YTD country coffers have received payments on 118 million track downloads. TEA albums (11.8 million) added to regular album sales would yield a YTD country total of 42.98 million.