Scanning Soundscan - 8/11

I missed a week of chart coverage, but now I’m back to look at what’s selling across the country.

A hearty congrats to our friends at Merge Records for the #1 chart debut of Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs. It was a bit of a nailbiter, waiting to see if the album would make it to the top or have to settle for #2. In the end, the Canadian collective moved 156k in their first week on the chart (beating Eminem by about 4,000 copies).

Their last album, Neon Bible, debuted on the chart at #2 and sold 92k in its first week. The Suburbs was undoubtedly assisted to the top by low pricing. Amazon’s MP3 store offered the title for $3.99 for an entire week, mass merchants had the cd for as low as $7.99, and even many indie retailers offered the album for $9.99. I still don’t understand how ANY LABEL is putting out single cd titles right now for more than $10. It makes no sense. People will buy your music if it is priced right. Learn and act!

Digging deeper into the numbers, 97k of the 156k total for The Suburbs was moved digitally. About 6300 copies were sold on vinyl (a beautiful gatefold 2LP set that cost about $25 at most retailers). The strata breakdown on the record is 12% chain, 11% indie retail, 7% mass merchant/big box, and 70% ‘non-traditional’ (aka digital & online retailers). Again, those numbers are remarkably skewed because of the Amazon pricing.

In other debuts, Interscope continues to milk the Lady Gaga teat with a remix collection that bowed at #6 with 39k (almost 19k was digital, about 150 copies sold on wax). Not many other things are worth mentioning in terms of 1st week sales (unless you’re a big fan of Buckcherry).

*One of the big debuts I missed last week was from Best Coast. Crazy For You debuted at #36 last week with 10k. This week, it falls to #136 and its 2 week cume is 14k.

*About 1000 Wavves fans held out for King Of The Beach to hit vinyl last week, making it the #2 bestseller on the format behind Arcade Fire. This extra push helped the album debut on the proper Top 200 Albums chart at #168. Total scans for the release are almost at 7k after 6 weeks.

*After 43 weeks on the chart, Florence + The Machine crossed the 100k mark with Lungs. It sold almost 4700 copies last week for a total of almost 102k in U.S. sales.

*Lastly, my favorite chart nugget of the week: the infamous Gregory Brothers mix of Antoine Dodson’s news interview/internet sensation (dubbed “Bed Intruder Song”) was released as a digital single. It debuts at #149 on the Digital Singles chart with over 10,500 people paying $1.29 a pop for it. I sure hope some of that is actually going to Antoine and his sister Kelly (who is credited with a ‘featuring’ tag on the iTunes listing).