Beatles CDs: 235,000 in 2 days
During the first two days of release, newly remastered Beatles CDs have sold more than 235,000 copies and will take over many of the top positions on next week’s charts of the nation’s bestselling albums, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
The preliminary figures are from seven retailers that account for approximately 70% of all CD sales in the nation. “Abbey Road” is leading among 14 newly refurbished titles, and Billboard reports that it could sell 100,000 copies by the end of the sales monitoring period on Sunday. It’s currently the third bestselling album of the week, behind Jay-Z’s “The Blueprint 3” and Miley Cyrus' “Time of Our Lives” EP. Jay-Z’s album went on sale a day before the Beatles albums arrived in stores Sept. 9, and Cyrus’ latest showed up two days earlier.
“It looks like the Beatles will own nine out of the top 10 titles” on the Top Pop Catalog Albums chart, “with Michael Jackson's resilient ‘Number Ones’ the lone non-Beatles set,” Billboard reported.
Individual Beatles albums won’t appear on the Billboard’s Top 200 Albums chart of bestsellers, which encompasses only new titles or those that have been out for less than 18 months. But the newly created stereo and mono box sets will be eligible because they are new compilations.
The Beatles are expected to dominate both the Pop Catalog and Top Comprehensive Albums chart, which combines new and catalog releases.
Retail prognosticators are estimating that in total Beatles albums may sell 500,000 to 600,000 copies by Sunday night. But Billboard hedged its bets a bit.
“Predicting first-week sales for the Beatles reissues is more complicated than usual,” Billboard’s report stated. “Because the albums are being sold not just through music retailers, but also in an array of stores that don't normally sell music, this throws a wrench into traditional sales projection models. In turn, all of these projections could very well grow to be bigger than expected once the sales week ends.”
--Randy Lewis
Photo credit: Apple Corps
This makes me very happy! A few days ago I bought A Hard Day's Night and Abbey Road remasteres and I'm eventually going to replace all of my great Beatles CD
s with the remasters!
I was born in early 1965 by the way but I have been a *huge* highly impressed Beatles fan(especially a big John & Paul fan since I was 9,I got my first Beatles book for my 11th birthday and I had every Beatles album by age 13.
In my late teens I got many solo albums from John& Paul's best solo period,the early-mid 1970's.
Does anyone know if any people in their teens and 20's or 30's are some of the customers buying these remastered Beatles CD's? When their Anthology and 1 CD's came out about 30% of the people buying them were teens.
Posted by: m4165 | September 12, 2009 at 12:17 PM
Amazing beatles are still viable. Tribute Bands have kept them alive to some extent too! http://www.maximumbands.com/let_it_be.html is a great example of this. I'm sure we will be seeing more acts like this all over now.
Posted by: Maximum Bands | September 12, 2009 at 12:53 PM
Topping the charts after 30+ years. Guess what sales for Jay-Z and Miley will be in 2039.
Posted by: TomWi | September 13, 2009 at 01:01 PM
I am 34, and a self proclaimed Beatles Evangelist, having turned maybe dozens of the "unsaved" into believers.
Though I already own everything they ever did, I gladly re-purchased EVERY disk this week.
We are so lucky that The Beatles were so great, and that peace and love and understanding is THE runing theme in their music.
John said "All you Need is Love.", I would add, All you Need is Love, and EVERY Beatle album!
Posted by: GabeMc | September 13, 2009 at 03:21 PM