Beyonce’s big start paces rare gain for 2006 sales
Turns out Beyonce’s birthday is not just a celebration for the singer, but for the whole music industry. The No. 1 bow by her second solo album, “B’Day,” also signals the first time in four months that album sales beat those of the comparable 2005 sales week.
Released September 5, the day after her 25th birthday, it opens with 541,000 copies, 59 percent more than the 317,000 first-week sales that greeted her first solo album, “Dangerously in Love,” in 2003.
There was only one period in the seven-album career of her group, Destiny’s Child, when she had a larger sales week: Third set “Survivor” began at 663,000 in May 2001.
The improvement over her first solo album’s start is no surprise. With this record arriving just a few months before her starring role in “Dreamgirls” hits screens in December, Beyonce’s celebrity has never been greater, fetching beaucoup ink in magazines and newspapers.
Her August 31 performance at MTV’s Video Music Awards set the stage for “B’Day.” The video for second single “Ring the Alarm” was MTV’s most-played clip during release week (29 plays) and also was among the 10 most-played videos at BET and VH1 Soul. The song enters the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 12, her highest debut either solo or with Destiny’s Child.
Beyonce’s opening sum is the best Nielsen SoundScan week by any solo artist this year. It is the third-largest total by any 2006 album, exceeded only by Rascal Flatts’ “Me and My Gang” (722,000) and Tool’s “10,000 Days” (564,000).
“B’Day” is the fifth album in 2006 to start in the half-million-plus club, compared with four during the first 36 sales weeks of 2005.
RISING TIDE
Beyonce’s “B’Day” becomes the 25th album to bow at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2006, but it manages a feat few of those have accomplished. Namely, it paces a gain over last year’s same-week album sales.
Mind you, it’s a slim gain of less than 1 percent, but a victory, nonetheless.
This signals the first uptick over comparable-week 2005 album volume since May and the first since April that wasn’t triggered by a holiday shift.
The Mother’s Day spike of 7.9 percent posted in the week that ended May 14 was a mirage, as the gift-giving occasion happened a week later in 2006 than it did in 2005. Similarly, the 20 percent advance reported for the week ending April 16 compared this year’s Easter frame to a non-holiday week.
The two weeks leading up to Easter were the last occasions before now when album volume rose without the benefit of a calendar quirk.
In the one that ended April 2, when rapper T.I. bowed at No. 1 with a 522,000-unit start for “King,” album sales were up by 4 percent over the same 2005 frame. A week later, the 700,000-plus start for the aforementioned Rascal Flatts album led a 15 percent rise in album volume.
Those advances were the first ones posted since the very first stanza of 2006, a rally that followed consecutive gains in the tracking weeks that ended with Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Now that a crowded list of A-level talent is releasing albums in the last four months of the year, can the industry cut the 5 percent gap from last year’s album pace? Not a safe bet, because the last four months of any year are chock-full of new superstar albums.
In the last trimester of 2003, a September-December rally that included new releases from the likes of OutKast,
Alicia Keys,
Toby Keith, the Beatles and
Clay Aiken cut the prior-year album gap from 8.5 percent at the end of August to a more digestible 3.6 percent deficit by year’s end.
But in 2004, almost all of the 7.2 percent gain over prior-year sales built during the first eight months got coughed up, slimming to a mere 1.3 percent lead by the year’s 52nd week, despite a high-profile parade during the last four months that included new albums from U2,
Shania Twain, Green Day and Ray Charles.
The gap in prior-year album sales increased slightly during the last four months of 2001 and 2002, but narrowed during the last trimester of 2005.
This year’s march continues in the coming week with
Justin Timberlake’s “FutureSex/ LoveSounds,” which like “B’Day” had an initial shipment of 1.3 million and is projected to start with sales of around 600,000.
Reuters/Billboard
