Rascal Flatts scales heights as country sales slip

By Geoff Mayfield

LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - As Rascal Flatts becomes just the second country group, after Dixie Chicks, to start two different albums with Nielsen SoundScan weeks above the half-million-unit mark, the batch of major releases that has rolled out during the past few weeks unravels a brain teaser.

The act that owned the largest frame of 2006 now owns the best country week thus far of 2007, because Rascal Flatts' "Still Feels Good" opens with 547,000 copies.

First-week sales for Flatts' new album are down 24.3 percent from the 722,000 first-week sales that greeted the group's "Me and My Gang" in April 2006. That marked last year's best sales week by any album, and the title went on to be the second-best seller of 2006, topped only by another Disney Music Group set, the soundtrack to "High School Musical."

Compare how Flatts' sales shifted from one album to the next with some of this year's best-selling rap albums, and that brain teaser comes into play. Rap albums have declined more in recent years than country, but you wouldn't guess that if you compared starts by each genre's biggest stars.

Aside from last week's chart queen, Reba McEntire, who started at No. 1 with her best SoundScan week, country's top-shelf artists are showing a greater evaporation from their previous heights than we've seen with this year's biggest rappers.

The opener for Flatts' "Still" is down 24.3 percent from "Gang." Earlier this year, Tim McGraw topped the big chart with 325,000 for "Let It Go," but that was down 57.5 percent from his best week, scored when 2004's "Live Like You Were Dying" opened at 766,000.

FOOTNOTES AND FALLOUT

Some footnotes are afoot with some of the country stars' shifts. For example, Kenny Chesney's recent "Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates" is one of his tiki-hut diversions rather than a core country album, so it's not entirely fair to compare the new album's 387,000-copy start with his career-best 551,000 for "When the Sun Goes Down" in 2004.

Even easier to explain is how political fallout moved the Dixie Chicks from a 780,000-unit start for "Home" in 2002 to 526,000 last year when "Taking the Long Way" arrived. That furor over Natalie Maines' remarks about the president alienated George W. Bush supporters, who even now account for about one-third of the populace. More significant, the row isolated the Chicks from country radio and its listeners.

Country was one of just two major categories to increase its market share in 2006, when overall album sales declined by 5 percent. But through September 30, the genre's sales stand at 37 million, down 26 percent from the same week last year and down 18 percent from that point of 2005.

Rap albums, at 31 million through September 30, are off 25.4 percent from last year's pace and 41.2 percent from the same span of 2005. Yet Kanye West scored the best sales week of this year or last when "Graduation" opened in September with a career-best 957,000, up 11 percent over his prior peak, 860,000 for 2005 set "Late Registration."

Earlier this year, T.I.'s second No. 1 on the Billboard 200, "T.I. vs T.I.P.," was down only 10.3 percent from the opener of his 2006 chart-topper, "King" (468,000 and 522,000, respectively).

While we'll acknowledge that the 691,000-unit start for 50 Cent's new "Curtis" was down 39.4 percent from his best week, since the start of 2006, the only album besides West's "Graduation" to roll a bigger week than "Curtis" was Flatts' "Gang."

What's it all mean? Chalk it up to a music industry that becomes curiouser and curiouser.

Reuters/Billboard