Scanning Soundscan - 9/8

It’s just plain sad to see a band like Disturbed is not only still around, but that they can still debut at the top of the charts. In fact, Asylum is the band’s fourth consecutive #1 album. It racked up about 179k in sales (54k were digital).

Other worthless debuts in the Top 10 include Now 35 at #2 with 105k and the inexplicable return of the Goo Goo Dolls at #7 with 34k. Heart also hit the comeback trail with Red Velvet Car. It sold 27k in its first week, which was good enough for a #10 debut.

*On the heels of his Oscar win for “Crazy Heart”, Ryan Bingham debuts at #19 with Junky Star. It sold about 17k in the first week. This is particularly strong when you consider his last album peaked at #65.

*Jenny Lewis teams up with boyfriend Jonathan Rice for the Jenny & Johnny album I‘m Having Fun Now. It only debuted at #37 with sales a touch over 10k. It’s pretty fascinating to me that this album was even beat on the charts by The Weepies, whose Be My Thrill sold almost 1500 more copies than J&J and debuts at #34. Ms. Lewis can, perhaps, take consolation in the fact that I’m Having Fun Now is #1 on the LP charts, selling over 1000 copies on vinyl.

*Ra Ra Riot plummeted from #36 to #147 in their second week, selling another 3400 copies of The Orchard. The 2 week total is almost at 14k and it sits at #55 on the Digital Albums chart. As the band hits the road to support this record, I expect very consistent sales to follow the track of their debut.

*Philip Selway from Radiohead released his debut solo album on Nonesuch called Familial. It debuts at #7 on the Heatseekers chart with sales of about 2300.

*I did read that Phoenix were officially certified GOLD this week (sales of 500k) for Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. The album is still sitting at #123 on the charts after 67 weeks of release, although its official Soundscan total is about 488k. Considering that Astralwerks did NOTHING with the band’s last album domestically, it’s pretty impressive to see how Glassnote helped catapulted their career stateside with this one.

*It’s also worth noting another big success for the Glassnote label: Mumford & Sons. We were playing that band on WOXY off their import album in early 2009. In fact, we had them booked to play a live session with us in March at SXSW that year but their singer lost his voice. The session ended up getting recorded overseas by our pal Drunk Country and aired in May of 2009. Now, a year and half later, Sign No More is on its way to 200k here in the U.S.

1. minneapolisfuckingrocks liked this
2. maura said: gold certifications mean shipments, not sales. this bad data point was passed around all over last week! sigh.
3. hotterthangeorgiaasphalt posted this