If anyone in the music business was hoping that the one-two punch of a holiday weekend and big-name releases would magically convince people to pay for music one last time, they may want to pour themselves a stiff drink, or at least spike their morning latte:
Billboard is reporting that the No. 1 album, Kanye West's
808s & Heartbreak, sold 425,000-450,000 copies over the course of last week, while Guns N' Roses'
Chinese Democracy woefully underperformed, moving between 250,000 and 260,000 copies during its first week on Best Buy's shelves. And that's not all: Depending on who you ask, overall music sales were down anywhere between 10% and 30% when compared with last year's holiday weekend, although online numbers were OK. Meanwhile, a UK tabloid is claiming that bigwigs at Universal Music Group are blaming the soft landing of
Chinese Democracy squarely on Axl, because he didn't do enough press for the album. Even though it probably received more free press than any other record this year. Yeah, it couldn't be that people currently see Guns N' Roses as something of a novelty act, and that people who liked
Appetite probably aren't so into the new sound, and that even those people who wanted to give Axl a shot were a bit weirded out by the whole preserved-in-1999-amber feel of the final recorded product, could it?
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Idolator
Sure, Black Friday was a disappointing day for artists who had new releases out, but a little bit of digging into SoundScan shows that the numbers weren't all bad. Taylor Swift, for example, had quite the banner week; her new album Fearless experienced a rare third-week upswing, one that was so dramatic, she nabbed the No. 2 spot on the chart, ahead of Chinese Democracy—and her old album surged back into the Top 30, too. There were many other artists whose albums' sales tallies improved from the prior week, no doubt thanks to some people out there still being OK with the prospect of holiday shopping. (Not too many, but a few.) After the jump, a look at which albums actually performed well on the first-gift-giving-week's chart, and the family members for whom they're likely being snagged.
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First-week sales of Christina Aguilera's Target-exclusive greatest-hits package Keeps Getting Better, which contains two new songs and two reworkings of old tracks: 73,000. Single-week sales of the title track, which also happens to be one of the two fresh entries on the album: 63,000 (it's sold 479,000 copies to date). You have to wonder: At what point do these cash-in greatest-hits packages get to be, well, not worth the effort, even with the one-big-box-only deals? [
