Shania Whips Mariah
The invasion is effectively over. A few big-name releases, like
Phish’s Round Room are still trickling into record stores,
but the onslaught of new albums sent out in time for the holiday
season has wound down. Last week twelve new records busted into the
Top Fifty, the week prior ten did the same, and fourteen newcomers
bounced in three weeks ago.
This week there were two, and neither had much of a shot at
unseating chart queen Shania Twain, whose Up! sold 317,000
copies, according to SoundScan, to hold on to Number One for the
third straight week. Furthermore, with release dockets looking
somewhat clear between now and, um, spring, Twain is positioned to
be this year’s version of Creed’s Weathered, which nearly
set a mark for consecutive weeks at Number One by dominating the
holidays and weakened January and February charts. Shania’s third
big week puts Up! at 1.8 million units sold to date, and
likely just one week from topping 2 million.
Tim McGraw’s Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors held
on tightly at Number Two with sales of 251,000. The second week
tally matches the best first-week number McGraw had ever mustered
with his previous releases. The album has sold 852,000 copies in
its two weeks of sale and will handily top 1 million before
Christmas.
Mariah Carey’s Charmbracelet hardly lit up the charts,
but the record is off to a much better start than last year’s
disastrous Glitter soundtrack. Charmbracelet sold
241,000 copies, more than double Glitter‘s 116,000 figure
from more than a year ago. But week one isn’t always the best gauge
for Carey, who is the quintessential singles-driven artist. Her
career has been built on records slowly burning towards 10 million
copies sold behind a string of hits. Her strongest debut,
Rainbow in 1999, debuted Number Two with sales of 322,000,
modest by the yardstick for contemporary blockbusters. Her last
Number One debut, 1997’s Butterfly, moved only 235,000
copies in its first week.
While Mariah has provided a convenient target for jest and
criticism over the past year, perhaps it was Virgin that deserved
the slagging for ponying up a monstrous $81.6 million, four-record
deal; one that the label scotched after Glitter tanked.
Could it be that pirated songs aren’t the reason the record
industry is bleeding money, but rather $80 million contracts like
the ones offered to Carey, R.E.M., Janet Jackson and Whitney
Houston? Not only is it bad business, but with the fickleness of
the market, it’s lousy gambling. In Carey’s case, she netted a
reported $49 million for a single record that has sold fewer than 3
million copies to date. Carey’s new, more modest deal with Island
was for a reported $20 million for three albums, in addition to her
own imprint with the label. The label’s road towards
Mariah-profitability is certainly shorter than Virgin’s, and with
the release issued through Carey’s MonarC partnership with Island,
she stands to make more green on the backend should the album
perform well. And as this week’s figures suggest Mariah can still
be money in the bank.
The rest of the chart show evidence of the winter lull beginning
to set in. Only eight albums in the Top Fifty and fourteen in the
Top 100 enjoyed a sales increase from the previous week. And all
the way down at Number Thirty-five, Josh Groban’s In
Concert was the week’s second-highest debut with sales of
59,000, followed by the Eminem-less sequel to the 8 Mile
soundtrack, which seemed to set off B.S. detectors among listeners.
The compilation settled in at Number 152 with sales of 12,000.
And don’t expect a lot of movement in the coming weeks. Some of
the hits with legs — Avril Lavigne’s Let Go (Number Six
with sales of 175,000), Groban’s self-titled debut (Number Twelve,
130,000), The Eminem Show (Number Fifteen, 109,000), Norah
Jones’ Come Away With Me (Number Seventeen, 100,000) —
will continue to walk back towards the Top Ten, as some of the
strong-yet-forgettable debuts start to make their hasty exits.
This week’s Top Ten: Shania Twain’s Up!; Tim McGraw’s
Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors; Mariah Carey’s
Charmbracelet; Now That’s What I Call Music! 11;
8 Mile soundtrack; Avril Lavigne’s Let Go;
Jennifer Lopez’s This Is Me . . . Then; 2Pac’s Better
Dayz; the Dixie Chicks’ Home; and Faith Hill’s
Cry.