Weekly Register: The Soundtrack For Spring Break

It was an up week
On the sales beat.

Luke Bryan’s Spring Break…Here To Party popped the debut keg, rising to the top of the Current Country and Top 200 Album charts floating on a sea of springtime suds, bikini clad sun worshippers and almost 150k units sold…

Bryan’s highly successful Spring Break series began five years ago as a musical extra conceived by his label’s marketing department to help engage fans and give them additional music in between full scale releases. This year for the first time, his Spring Break offering is a full length, 14-track project containing songs from previously released Spring Breaks plus new music. The titles from the annual series—With All My Friends; Hangover Edition; It’s a Shore Thing; and Suntan City—tell you a great deal about the audience and the marketing behind this novel idea.

Here To Party has a video, but no radio single. However, considering the Georgia heartthrob’s Dirt Road Diaries Tour, an upcoming CMT Spring Break special and his co-hosting the ACM Awards on April 7, it’s highly likely this music will not be a closely guarded secret.

Bryan’s Tailgates & Tanlines, now sporting 83 weeks on the Current Country chart was No. 9 this week scanning almost 11k units (50 percent digital) and giving the ACM Entertainer nominee two Top Ten titles.

The Rest Of The Story
The Weekly Grid graphs are a quick-look way to absorb the week’s sales story. As you can see, country (-4 percent) is outperforming all genre sales (-7.8 percent) for 2013 YTD but both are in negative territory. County’s stats improved this week while all-genre worsened.

Digital country albums as a percentage of total country albums was about 25.4 percent a year ago at this time but more country fans are now choosing digital as shown by the seven percent increase. All-genre digital album sales as a percentage of total album sales, now about 44.8 percent has also grown about seven percent compared to the same period last year.

Ashley Monroe also helped jolt the country tonnage needle this week with her highly-praised debut, Like A Rose. The Pistol Annies suffragette landed at No. 10 with almost 11k units. Interestingly, 75 percent of Monroe’s sales were digital which, while proving her audience demo is techno-savvy, also gives insight about the realities of landing physical product from new artists on America’s rapidly shrinking retail music shelf space.

And then there is this week’s No. 2 country album, now in its 14th week on the chart with RTD sales of 385,308 units and sporting one of the format’s most incredible success stories—Florida Georgia Line. FGL enjoyed a 21 percent boost in album sales this week, plus lodged two Top 10 tracks in the Digital Genre country tracks chart.

Over in track city, husband Blake Shelton tops wife Miranda Lambert for a second week as the couple’s songs notch No. 1 and 2 respectively. Shelton’s “Sure Be Cool If You Did” added 73k downloads this week for an RTD total of about 647k. “Mama’s Broken Heart” from Miranda added 58k giving her an RTD of 408k.

Two new country tracks entered the Top 10 winners circle. Luke Bryan’s “Buzzkill” (from the Here To Party debut) took No. 5 with over 50k downloads and Kenny Chesney’s “Pirate Flag” was No. 10 with almost 36k new downloads.

Check out the list of upcoming new releases, places your Weekly Register sales bets, and tune in next week…