Sales Depts; Start Your Engines

Are you tired of watching country sales totals dripple and drip like a leaky faucet? This week for the first time this year, they have finally fallen further into the red zone than the overall industry. In fact, according to Nielsen SoundScan for the week ending 9-5-2010, overall album sales are down -12.5% YTD while country album sales have dipped -13.2%. [see graph] Fortunately, help is on the way!

Currently country has scanned 23.859 million country units in 35 weeks, an average of .68 million per week. If the pace held steady over the year’s remaining 17 weeks country would end up with a meager 35 million units for the year, a disaster compared with the 46.13 million sold in 2009. But that is highly unlikely considering the holidays are always the strongest sales period and this year’s release schedule is especially powerful.

So what is the good news? The good word arrives in the form of upcoming CD releases from Jamey Johnson (9/14), Zac Brown Band (9/21), Kenny Chesney (9/28), Toby Keith (10/5), Sugarland (10/19), Taylor Swift (10/25), Jason Aldean (11/2), Reba (11/9) and Rascal Flatts (11/16). Finally after sloshing through months of underachiever releases, country is getting ready to start its sales engine. In fact, this writer is so optimistic about the lineup that if the steep downward tilt of the graph’s country trend line doesn’t improve, I promise to stop covering country sales. [There, I said it!]