Monday, June 06, 2011

There’s Taylor and Lady Gaga. Then, there’s everyone else.

That fact was proven last week as just one-sixth of Lady Gaga’s massive 1.1 million debut for Born This Way, Brad Paisley’s This Is Country Music landed at #2 on the SoundScan Hot 200 Albums chart with his tally nearing 153,000 copies sold. 

Country albums continue to dominate sales figures, week after week.
 

Gaga’s drive to do every possible tactic to achieve record-breaking first week sales was, we hear, as a result of seeing Taylor do it late last year.  She was determined to outsell Taylor’s first week and get in the “record” books too, it’s said.

The gossip mags claim that Gaga is Taylor’s guilty pleasure and Taylor makes music Gaga enjoys too.

Both of them have to understand the demands of fame and the dreams-come-true compromises that the other one no-doubt has made to get to where they are.

Another sign that these two first-week million sellers are at the pinnacle? 

Weird Al is parodying both of them in his new LP.

Don’t look for that one to sell a million.

The numbers we’ll never - but I wish we could - see:  it would be fascinating to wait a year and subtract the returns in the pipeline from those first week sales figures to see who won the real race, not just for first week publicity but how many of those million sold are in the collections of record buyers, which one made the most money from scanned sales.

Doing what it takes to win the one week sales sprint is what it's all about, of course, and not about sharing real numbers only their accountants will eventually tabulate.

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