Low tide in October for album sales

By Geoff Mayfield

LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - For labels and music retailers, the Billboard 200 brings a scarier sight than any ghost, goblin or witch you might encounter on Halloween: a No. 1 album in October with a sales week of less than 100,000 copies.

We've had light chart-toppers before. Since May 1991, when the big chart switched to Nielsen SoundScan data, there have been 16 weeks when sales for the No. 1 slot fell below 100,000, with seven of those occurring this year. It just seems more jarring to see a number that light during the last four months of the year, when high-profile artists seek to be prime attractions during holiday shopping's traffic.

While it's comforting to see a figure as recognizable as Bruce Springsteen return to the top step, we just wish he could have done it with a bigger figure than 77,000 units. Not that the 42nd sales week of the year guarantees gangbusters.

True, this marks the same frame in which Limp Bizkit's "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water" surpassed 1 million copies in 2000, Clay Aiken's "Measure of a Man" opened with 613,000 in 2003 and Faith Hill's "Cry" landed with 472,000 in 2002. But, in six of the past 10 years, this week's No. 1 album sold less than 200,000, the lightest of those sums being the 131,000 that LeAnn Rimes' "You Light Up My Life -- Inspirational Songs" moved in 1997.

In addition, this week's tug of war between Springsteen's "Magic" and Kid Rock's "Rock N Roll Jesus" is one of the tightest for No. 1 that we've seen in SoundScan history. With fewer than 300 copies separating them, there have been only three weeks when the top-selling album owned a slimmer margin. The tightest and most recent of those occasions happened earlier this year, when Daughtry beat the "Dreamgirls" soundtrack by less than 150 copies in February.

Get ready for a bigger sales number next week, because the cavalry arrives in the person of "American Idol" champ Carrie Underwood.

Reuters/Billboard