WEEK IN PREVIEW: CLAY PROBABLY #1 AGAIN, BUT ROD'S GAINING

Put a guy on TV for a few months, release his record five months after the show finishes, then unleash a barrage of publicity when his record comes out and you’ll get a record that sticks at the top of the charts for a couple of weeks.

RCA’s Clay Aiken, in case you’ve been living under a rock or surrounded by smoke and fire as Los Angeles burns to the ground, had the #1 album last week, and he may well have the #1 album this week. But it's no cakewalk. His sales will drop by around two-thirds after last week’s boffo 600k+ bow, which means Aiken will go head-to-head with Rod the Mod, though the Idol runner-up will probably edge his way to the top.

J Records icon Rod Stewart’s Great American Songbook Vol. 2 is trending up after his Oprah appearance and looks to sell close to the 200k range which Aiken's record will do this week. A TV appearance selling records? Who’da thunk it?

Just behind Rod will be The Eagles Very Best of (WSM). Thanks to a big direct response campaign (read: TV sales), the double-disc set looks to cross the 150k mark. Hmm, TV ads selling records? Who’da thunk it? All this television stuff has us thinking, as you’ve been telling us for years, that we’re in the wrong business.

Tomorrow will see the new one from RCA’s The Strokes hitting the streets. While likely to put up respectable numbers, Aiken will probably have a third week at #1. But look out for next week (11/4), which will bring Sarah McLachlan (Arista), Ja Rule (Murder Inc./IDJ), P.O.D. (Atlantic), Toby Keith (DreamWorks), Now 14 (Columbia) and a live Coldplay set (Capitol).

For those Clay Aiken fanclub members out there with questions about the sales chart, please keep emailing our sales gurus. They’re very lonely.