ONE-DAY SALES: THE DOOR’S WIDE OPEN FOR 3 DOORS DOWN

We’ve crunched the numbers, folks, and based on sales totals from Tuesday (2/8), we’ve determined that Seventeen Days, the much-anticipated album from best-selling Republic/Universal rockers 3 Doors Down, is a cinch to debut at #1 on next week’s HITS Top 50 Album Chart off a projected 200k-plus sales. We’ve been wrong before, of course, but this time there’s no doubt in our minds (actually, there’s not much of anything in our minds, other than impure thoughts about Kate Beckinsale).

Two other bows are poised to break 100k: MCA Nashville’s Le Ann Womack, who could hit 125k, and Motown’s Brian McKnight. Reprise’s Michael Buble looks good for just shy of 100k, given that his album comes out just in time for Valentine’s Day.

A notch below is BNA’s Totally Country, a Now-style hits collection featuring the breakthrough singles from Gretchen Wilson and Big & Rich, along with the requisite big names: Chesney, Jackson, Keith, Paisley, et al.

Sunday night’s Grammy Awards won’t have a profound effect on next week’s chart because the show comes at the very end of the sales week. We should see some spikes the following week.

And now for something completely different—namely, some good news. The industry was up 9.7%/+1 million units vs. last week and up 7.2%/+800k from the comparable week in’ 04 on total scans of 11.439 million units. The top 200 was up 8% vs. last week Those numbers aren’t nearly enough to turn around the year-to-date slide, however. YTD album scans are down 8.7%/-4.9 million units vs. last year, with current-release ccans off 10.1%/-3.5 million and catalog titles behind 2004 by 6.4%/-1.4 million.