McCreery Leads Sales Charge

For the sales week ended 10-9-2011 Scotty McCreery once again proved the power of TV for exposing and marketing new artists. McCreery, the winner of season 10 of American Idol released his new album, Clear As Day last week (Oct. 4), while celebrating his 18th birthday.

McCreery’s album scanned about 197,000 units according to Nielsen SoundScan allowing it to ride atop the Country album chart and the Top 200 Albums all-genre list. Quite a feat for a newcomer without massive radio support.

Interestingly, McCreery did not show much heat on the digital download tracks chart, ranking No. 15 on the country tracks list and a tepid No. 78 on the all genre tracks chart. Walking in step with digital tracks, his album sales had a smaller-than-average digital percentage, too (18% in digital format). However, it is worth noting that the song, “I Love You This Big,” has already sold over 630,000 downloads giving it Gold status.

Rodney Atkins also drove out onto the sunny sales infield with his newest titled Take A Back Road which scanned almost 35k units (26% digital) earning a no. 3 position on the country albums chart this week.

Next week the American Idol shadow will again be cast over the sales charts as season 10 runner up, lovely Lauren Alaina steps up to launch her album effort.

Graphically speaking: A quick look at our newly updated graph shows that as a result of Scotty and Rodney, country sales bounced back up to a 9.6% YTD lead. However, with 29.63 million YTD units already sold and last year’s total of 43.72 million units it means that we have to scan an additional 14.09 million units in the 12 weeks remaining for 2011. Yes that’s about 1.174 million per week, a pretty tall order.

Hank did it this way?—Not documented on the SoundScan charts was this week’s Hank Williams Jr. free download, “Keep The Change.” The song, written in response to his recent dismissal from ESPN’s Monday Night Football over political comments he made has reportedly been downloaded over 150,000 times in about 24 hours. The song is available at www.hankjr.com and has received placement on other sites such as kidrock.com.