Here are Carrie's first week sales for her single:
Billboard Hot Single Sales: 129,610 (No. 1)
Billboard Hot Digital Sales: 39,024 (No. 4)
Total Sales (Physical & Digital): 168,634
Tomorrow we'll find out where Carrie landed on the overall Billboard singles charts, which combine sales and airplay numbers, and which are used by the industry to determine hits vs. misses.
This year, Billboard began adding digital download sales to physical in-store sales, which inflates the total numbers. Carrie's in-store sales of 129,610 are the weakest sales numbers for any AI winner to date. (I'll report Bo's numbers when they come in next week, but I don't expect much.)
Here's the first week sales (in-store numbers only, and rounded off) for past AI winners:
Kelly: "Before Your Love"/"A Moment Like This" -- 236,000 (eventually went platinum)
Ruben: "Superstar"/"Flying Without Wings" -- 286,000
Fantasia: "I Believe"/"Chain of Fools"/"Summertime" -- 142,000
The AI leader in first-week single sales is Clay with 393,000 for his cover of "Bridge Over Troubled Water." (Don't remember what side 2 was on it.)
In other words, Carrie's in-store sales were lower than Fantasia's last year.
Just so Carrie fans here won't misunderstand and take it that I'm criticizing her rather than just reporting the numbers, here's some representative commentary from Pulse Music Board. A lot of music industry insiders participate there, and that's where I found the above numbers. (You have to subscribe to see Billboard's sales charts.) The first post is from Carrie's fan board, and the second is from one of the Mariah Carey fan boards. Both are verbatim:
------------
KikiMets
Global Moderator
Joined: Apr 2004
Posts: 6,003
Re: "Inside Your Heaven" - Carrie Underwood
« Reply #250 on Today at 8:26am »
Those sales are pretty bad. She did marginally better than Fantasia thanks to the inclusion of digital sales, but still pales in comparison to the first-week sales of the singles from the first 2 seasons (especially considering that season 1 had maybe half as many viewers as subsequent seasons).
------------
ross
New Member
Joined: Jun 2005
Posts: 5
Re: "We Belong Together," Mariah Carey Sixteenth #
« Reply #4014 on Today at 10:16am »i don't know if these type of posts get deleted but...
i can't believe i don't read more here about the ai/Fox fraud when it comes to record sales.
do you really believe that Carrie was #1 on itunes, but only #70 on wal-mart.com, and not in the buy.com's top100.
Considering NBC spent over $7M per episode for "Friends", don't you think FoxTV would spend $1M one-time to insure that carrie is #1 on the hot100, so ai seems like it is still finding future music stars?
Do you really believe that ruben sold 1.7M album1, but only sold .1M [Wolfie's note: by .1M I think he means 100,000] of album2?
Do you really believe that fantasia sold enough singles to barely be #1 on hot100 and 1.5M albums, yet is opening for Kem in short tour in small, non-sold-out venues?
As for Bo, i doubt he will be #1 because FoxTV only cares about the winner (see diana and justin, whose sales are legit, imo), so only buys the winners products.
Personally, i think kelly is the only legitimate super-star from ai (but clay's sales are also real, because his diminishing fans were initially so upset that ai gave ruben the title)
And that's counting digital downloads too? Ouch.