Last week Madonna’s latest album, MDNA, conquered the Billboard albums chart by selling 359,000 copies in its first week. Those sales figures were goosed quite a bit by CDs being bundled with concert tickets for Madonna’s upcoming tour, a practice that allowed Prince’s Musicology to go platinum back in 2004. About half of Madonna’s first-week sales, or 185,000 records, came from being sold as part of a ticket package.
As MDNA heads into its second week, the album appears headed for a major tumble, with Forbes reporting that sales dropped a whopping 88 percent, down to 46,000 copies. That’s the biggest second-week drop ever, a tumble that’s been attributed to the album’s lack of successful singles and Madonna’s limited promotion via TV appearances and live shows. [via Rolling Stone]
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Not a big fan of manipulating chart and sales performance with gimmicks such as bundling album sales with concert tickets. It muddies the waters forever after in terms of determining what was truly the most popular music of a given time. Madonna’s concert tickets are still a hot item, so there is still demand for her live performance. The precipitous drop of the second, unbundled week’s album sales, however, suggests fans are buying the tickets to see her perform older material, and the public have responded to her latest work with disinterest. As much as she tries to fight slipping into irrelevance (she seems, pathetically, to be going for a younger image with every new photo and video I see) she’s slowly becoming an oldies act. She ain’t the Beach Boys just yet, but neither is she any threat to Rihanna or Ke$ha at this point, either.
Every Moment Has A Song 