The LCD Soundsystem Soundscam: Could James Murphy Actually Top The Charts?

Brian Raftery | March 22, 2007 10:25 am
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Two months ago, LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy posted a message on the DFA Records board, in which he asked fans to send this week’s Sound Of Silver album to the top of the charts. His logic: If the Dreamgirls soundtrack can claim the top spot by selling a mere 60,064, than he could move at least the same amount of Silver copies:

lcd record 1 (the old record) sold a total of 60559 in the US since it was released. meaning, straight up, if everyone who bought the first record bought s.o.s. the week it’s released, then we’re totally #1. i’m sure some people who bought the old record have now moved on to extreme noise or something, but maybe there are enough new people to make up for it!

So how’s that working out for him so far?

So far, we only have a handful of online sales rankings to look at. And while these positions provide strictly anecdotal data, they do give an idea of how Sound Of Silver is faring against such just-released records from the likes of Modest Mouse and Joss Stone. All positions are as of this morning:

Amazon: No. 17 iTunes album chart: No. 9 BarnesandNoble.com: No. 26 Insound.com: No. 5

It looks as though Murphy’s biggest challenge is not only fending off Isaac and Joss–both of whom could cross the six-figure mark, according to HITS–but dealing with last week’s surprising amount of top-five debuts. Perhaps if Silver had been released in the dead of early winter, it would have stood a chance of hitting the upper echelons of the chart; as it stands now, it’ll be lucky to break the top ten. Of course, this was all just a tongue-in-cheek PR stunt, rather than a sincere desire for world domination merely disguised as a PR stunt. Right?