Weekly Register: Chilly Sales Set To Warm Up

The correlation between Nashville’s frigid temps and the music sales charts can’t be escaped this week as both all genre and country fall about two percentage points lower (see grids).

It’s not so much the “weather,” as “whether or not” there’s much new product to draw buyers online or into stores. Katie Armiger provided a bright spot this week however, with her debut effort entering the Current Country list at No. 7 touting an impressive 12k in units (14% digital). But still, the entire Top 75 Country albums chart was shy of 238k, probably a new all-time low on that gauge. In fact, Taylor Swift’s Red (No. 1; 41k) was the only title able to go north of 20k units! FGL (No. 2; 18k), Music of Nashville sndtrk (No. 3; 15k), Little Big Town (No. 4; 15k) and Jason Aldean (No. 5; 14k) filled out the Top 5.

Fortunately there are a few exciting releases on our radar over the coming weeks. For example, next week bins will be stuffed with new music from Randy Houser, Gary Allan and Tim McGraw (Curb)…a few weeks later Faith’s husband will have a second title enter the charts from his new label, Big Machine (2/5). I’m also on pins and needles waiting to hear the new effort from trio Blue Sky Riders (Kenny Loggins, Gary Burr and Georgia Middleman). Complete upcoming releases here.

Hit Tracks
The Band Perry slides up to No. 1 this week with “Better Dig Two” selling over 70k downloads. The trio gently nudged Blake Shelton’s “Sure Be Cool…” out of the top spot as the Voice judge moved to No. 2 with sales of 63k. And with this cold weather, everyone seems to want to go on a “Cruise,” helping to keep FGL in the No. 3 spot again this week with units of about 60k. Also in the coveted Top 10 are Gary Allan (No. 4; 58k) and Hunter Hayes (No. 5; 55k).

Lovely Hayden Panettiere from the series Nashville, debuts this week with “Love Like Mine” at No. 46. While I’ve never been one to enjoy soap operas, I have to say that I do look forward to this show with its sweeping Nashville cityscapes and great new songs each week from some of our city’s finest writers.

Speaking of digital tracks, there’s a comprehensive new report out this week from Columbia University called Copy Culture that reveals file sharing attitudes and behavior in the US and Germany. Read about it here, or see a quick infographic here.

Stay tuned for more Weekly Register, next week…