Pop: CD sales and digital downloads have screeched to a halt this week.
Drake only sold 23,563 CDs and digital downloads last week, while the number 1 album was The Avett Brothers’ “True Sadness” with about 45,000 copies. Now that’s true sadness.
But all was not lost for Drake. If we factor in his streaming sales, his “Visions” came in at 109,437. That was an increase of 86,000– nearly twice what the Avett Brothers sold. The Avetts, whose album is quite wonderful, by contrast had about 3,000 streams.
Drake is easily the streaming king at this point, and his “Hotline Bling” is bigger than ever. On Spotify, “Hotline” and “One Dance” account for close to 1 million streams total. By contrast, the Avett Brothers’ top 10 tracks together equal fewer than 70 million streams.
The pop chart this week was dismal for “real” sales– CDs and digital downloads. The top 10 sold about 200,000 copies. The top 50 was less than 400,000. Beyonce’s “Lemonade” has finally been drained.
The weird note of the week: a deep discount sale on Van Halen’s “1984” album, released 32 years ago, pushed it to number 12.
At the end of next week, new albums by Maxwell and Blink-182 will appear somewhere on the charts. Otherwise the balance of the summer looks pretty bleak with the exception of Steven Tyler’s solo album and DJ Khaled, who’s starting to turn up everywhere on TV.
The top albums in contention for Album of the Year (with September 30th looming as a deadline): Adele, Kanye West, Beyonce, Drake, Paul Simon, David Bowie and maybe the Avetts.
