An update on last week’s post about The Voice winner, Jordan Smith, who was poised to be the highest selling The Voice winner ever. He did it. The Billboard 200 chart is out and Jordan’s debut album, Something Beautiful, landed in the #2 spot behind The Voice coach Gwen Stefani’s What The Truth Feels Like. (It’s her first #1 on the BB200.)
The Republic Records singer sold 54,000 units, 52,000 in pure album sales. It’s the highest selling debut from a new artist so far in 2016. It’s also the highest ranking on the charts for any singing competition winner in 5 years, according to Yahoo Music.
As a comparison to other successful The Voice alums: Season 3 winner, Cassadee Pope, moved 43,000 copies of her debut Frame by Frame in its first week back in fall 2013. The Voice season 4 winner, Danielle Bradbery sold 41,000 copies of her self-titled debut in November 2013, and The Voice season 3 alum and rising star, Melanie Martinez, sold 41,000 units (including streams) of her debut album, Cry Baby on Atlantic records in August 2015.
Before we pop the champagne to celebrate Jordan finally breaking The Voice winner’s curse, we’ll have to wait and see if the album has legs. Cassadee Pope and Danielle Bradbery sold roughly 180,000 and 136,000 respectively. Impressively, Melanie Martinez is #60 on this week’s BB200 after 31 weeks on the chart! Now, THAT’S what you call legs.
It helps, of course, that Jordin is the first Republic Records artist from The Voice to actually be promoted in a significant way. Cassadee and Danielle did reasonably well because they were signed to Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Records, which has first refusal for all The Voice country acts. He promoted both singers as if they were new artists.
Season 2’s Jermaine Paul, and Season 6’s Josh Kaufman never released albums. Season 5 winner, Tessanne Chin’s debut was released so “quietly” you had to be following her on social media to know about it. Season 7 winner, Craig Wayne Boyd parted ways with Big Machine after both sides decided the partnership wasn’t a good fit. Season 8 winner, Sawyer Fredericks released a self-titled EP to very little fanfare in 2015. But he is currently working on an album. Will Republic make the effort to get the singer’s music out there? We’ll see.
Jordan has promoted his singles and albums on The Today Show and People’s Choice Awards. People magazine and other entertainment websites have been promoting the record with exclusives and interviews. Ads for the album aired during FOX’s live Palm Sunday special, The Passion Live. Plus, Jordan has been featured on the new season of The Voice with extended video packages, and you can be sure he’ll perform when the season goes live. (ETA: The Voice twitter has been promoting an April 13 appearance)
It also helps to have the Big Guy in your corner. The album was executive produced by The Voice producer Mark Burnett and his wife Roma Downey, responsible for lining up big name producer, David Foster. Jordan is also signed to Mark and Roma’s faith-based Lightworkers Media company. There are any number of avenues available to promote Jordan and his album, including appearances on Mark’s TV productions (he produces the People’s Choice Awards) and more. The man has clout in the industry. Whether he’ll become involved with the career of The Voice winner in the future remains to be seen. With Jordan, a Christian crossover artist, the fit with the religious couple was perfect. It may only be a one time thing. Besides, if Jordan becomes a mega-star, they can go back to worrying about making a great TV show. One very successful winner would go a long way to shutting up the criticism that the show doesn’t produce stars.
