Carly Rae Jepsen had the #1 song on the pop charts which has sold more than 5 million copies. It also was the #1 song on the HAC chart. That song was freakin’ everywhere. Her next single, the duet with Owl City, was high on the pop charts at the time her album dropped. Justin Bieber toured with her and pimped her pretty much every chance her got. She was promoted heavily.
She still sold 46K the first week her album was released. And she is far from the first person to have a huge hit single that has not been able to translate that into big album sales.

Moral of the story? Singles sales don’t always (or even usually) predict album sales.

We already discussed the CRJ comparison in earlier number threads. She is not an American Idol winner coming off her season six months ago. Singles don’t always sell albums, but most American Idol winners (with the exception of two) do. They are able to get close to 200K, or above, their debut week. One of those seasons the runner up managed to hit this mark. The only season that didn’t have a big album seller was season 9. This past Idol season and PP’s promo and chart placements has been nothing like season nine and the promotion and start that Lee had during his debut week.

ITunes only tells a small part of the story. We need to look at a wide range of retailers to have an idea. the album is #1 pre-orders at Walmart, but #53 on their best-seller list and #35 on Amazon best sellers.
I don’t how Clear As Day fared on these charts, but I remember DC’s and Adam’s albums being  in Amazon top 5 for long periods.
There is little that would indicate that PP’s opening sales will be very high, in my opinion. Whether they should be or not is a different matter.

The first week sales are only just that anyway, and ongoing sales are just as important. If the album is liked, and since P2 isn’t short of promo, the album will sell a substantial amount overall. So we’ll see.

Thanks. Presumably people do hear them, although without names it’s a little tough to then go looking for the singer.

I don’t think you can compare Scotty and P2. Scotty was an extremely popular winner, whose adoring and devoted fanbase would’ve bought anything he’d put out to support him after the show. He was that popular. P2 didn’t have anywhere near the same size fanbase, nor did he benefit from the same devotion, but people fell in love with Home. 

Scotty was loved for himself, P2 has his own, although small, fanbase, but his success was due mostly to his song. This is bound to make a huge difference when it comes to debut album sales. You obviously disagree, and so might others, but that’s how I see it.

I’m not saying people won’t eventually love the album and it’ll be commercially successful, but I don’t see mind boggling numbers for next week. I would’ve predicted 60-70k max, but because of Black Friday, it could sell 100k.

I hope Phillip has a good week, but it may be tough to even make the Top 10.  There are going to be a lot of recent releases for $5 on Black Friday (he’s not among them based on the ads I’ve seen), plus Rihanna, 1D, Taylor, etc.  Anything under 100K could probably get him some “another WGWG flop” press, although maybe Home will protect him from that.

The label projection was made public and posted here somewhere (can’t remember the thread) at about the same time we got the snippets, but I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it’s this high. 

I’m not sure if Philip has a small fanbase, if that’s true then how the heck did he won AI who have around 21 million viewers? Granted multiple voting is allowed but he probably have at least few million fans that can buy his songs even if he’s given a crappy one, don’t you think? OR does multiple voting hurt the winner down the road if there’s no hit song to sing anymore?…just wondering.

I’m not sure if Philip has a small fanbase, if that’s true then how the heck did he won AI who have around 21 million viewers?

Same way Lee DeWyze did, back when the show had a larger viewership.

We already know from the dismal EP sales of the other high-ranking finalists that none of his rivals in the top 5 had large core fanbases, so P2 presumably didn’t himself need a gigantic fanbase in order to win.

Lee and Kris both won Idol, and neither of them have very big fanbases. Most of the people who vote on Idol never buy any of the ex-Idols’ music — if they did, all of the winners and runners up would have had debut albums go multi-platinum. 

For example, I forget what the voting totals were this past year, but in 2010, I think there were 130 million votes for the finale. Let’s suppose Scotty got  70% of the votes — that would be 91 million votes for him. Now, let’s suppose people voted for him an average of 10 times — that would mean 9.1 million different people voted for him. Yet his album has sold “only” 1.1 million copies. That means only about 1 in 9 of the people who voted for him would have actually bothered to buy his album.

Now these numbers are hypothetical, since I have no idea how many votes Scotty actually got. But my point remains the same — only a small percentage of the people who vote on Idol actually end up buying these artists’ music.

I think the consensus is that Phillip was a less popular winner than Scotty. Which suggests he has a smaller hardcore fanbase, which in turn suggests he will sell fewer albums than Scotty.

The wild card in all of this, however, is the huge success of “Home,” and whether that has gained Phillip a bunch of new fans who care nothing about AI but will go out and buy his album. That is still TBD.