Country group the Zac Brown Band, as predicted, took the No. 1 spot for predictable-enough reasons: they’re the sort of group that moves albums, they did a traditional TV-appearance rollout, they had a heavy Amazon discount that Billboard suggested contributed 25K-30K of its 234K sales.
That’s not the real story. The real story is that Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange did even better than expected; Billboard had projected 100K-120K, and Ocean moved 131K, almost entirely digital sales. (A few stores had physical copies of the album, but they came late in the sales cycle and only accounted for a couple thousand sales.) In case these numbers mean little to you, that’s 3K more than Usher’s Looking 4 Myself, which had already spawned hits on every radio platform in 2012 (not to mention for the past decade or two), and only 4K fewer than Chris Brown, whose album promotion included ubiquitous television, awards-show and arguably tabloid appearances, who recorded a lengthy trailer with hypercube demons and–most importantly–whose fans would’ve mass-purchased Fortune even if the jewel case contained anthrax or was actually a jack-in-the-box made of knives, with a boldface warning reading “THIS IS ACTUALLY A JACK-IN-THE BOX MADE OF KNIVES. #YOLO #FORTUNE
Expect next week to be similarly strong for Ocean, as Channel Orange comes out in stores as well as online. But even so–would it be so much to ask to get Ocean a radio hit, too? “Sweet Life” could be it. “Pyramids” (edited down, obviously) could be it. “Thinking About You” could be it and probably was meant to be it, for Bridget Kelly. We don’t feel this is a lot to ask, you know?
Oh, also, this is a charts story, so we’d be remiss not to get an Adele stat in there. 21 has now dethroned Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill for most weeks in the top 10, with 73. Sorry, Alanis. Being dethroned by Adele is a standard career consequence for musicians these days. Maybe in a few months a parallel universe will open up that’ll make Havoc and Bright Lights a smash.
The post Frank Ocean, With Nothing But Digital Sales, Outsold Usher, Almost Outsold Chris Brown appeared first on Popdust.
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