ONE-DAY SALES:
THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Welcome to the music-biz equivalent of summer reruns. With no heavyweight acts hitting stores on the Tuesday just passed (aka yesterday), R. Kelly will have no challengers for the #1 spot on next week’s album chart. Even with the typical second-week drop-off of 50-60%, the Jive/ZLG star will tower above the rest of the field.

Three of the week’s four noteworthy bows (no pun intended) hail from Hip-Hop Nation. Likely to make the most noise is Geffen’s Slim Thug, who’s lined up to do around 125k. Behind him will be Columbia’s adolescent MC, Bow Wow, who should break 100k. Trailing them at 55k-60k will be Koch’s Diplomats.

Representing rock are the All-American Rejects, whose Interscope release is trending toward 75k.

Juxtaposed with these debuts will be a pair of familiar names, as Capitol’s Coldplay and Island/IDJ’s Mariah Carey continue to add to their respective platinum and double-platinum totals. Also sure to hang around is this week’s #2, Atlantic’s Missy Elliott.

And now for some perspective (sorry, kiddies, but you have to take your medicine if you want to get better). During the week just completed, consumers purchased 10.5 million albums, meaning 341k fewer albums were sold than the previous week, a drop of 3.1%. And that’s the good news. Compared to the comparable week in 2004, sales were down 12.3%—or 1.5 million units. While overall album sales on the year so far are off last year’s pace by 7.7% (or 24.6 million), current releases are down 9.1% (or just over 18 million), a not terribly encouraging stat. Total year-to-date sales: 293 million units.