ONE-DAY SALES:
LET THE SUMMER DOLDRUMS BEGIN!

We don’t know exactly how many units yesterday’s new releases will rack up, but we can predict this much: Next week’s chart will be less exciting than this week’s chart, last week’s chart or any recent week’s chart. That’s cuz there are no more big rock bands waiting on the runway as we hit the first week of summer—and as you know (assuming you’ve been paying attention), the market was driven throughout the spring by big-selling releases from the half-century-old-but-not-dead-yet family of genres.

Barring an unforeseen charge by Mariah Carey (whose Island/IDJ album is the CD equivalent of the Eveready bunny), Coldplay, the year’s biggest-selling band, will easily hold on to the #1 position for the third week in a row. The expected 30% drop from this week’s total of 336k will still put X&Y (Capitol) well over 200k, while this week’s #2 and #3, the debuting Foo Fighters (Roswell/RCA) and Backstreet Boys (Jive/ZLG) will likely do the standard 50% second-week swan dives, keeping both well out of contention.

It isn’t often that the first mention of the week’s new releases appears in the third paragraph, but that’s the sort of week we’re likely to see, kiddies. The biggest bow will probably be from Boyz N Da Hood—the first act to see the light of day under Bad Boy’s new deal with WMG—who are looking at around 100k, give or take, from this admittedly early vantage point. Behind da Boyz will be A&M/Interscope’s Keysha Cole, who should be close at 90k-95k. Columbia’s best-of from The Offspring is heading toward 60k, but it contains a new track that’s already a radio hit, providing the collection with some momentum. Rapper Birdman aka Baby (Universal) is trending 50k-60k, while ’90s rock star Billy Corgan is looking at an un-star-like 30k on his first solo album (WB).

Taking one last look over our shoulder, the industry experienced another comparatively positive week, paced by Coldplay, the Foos and Backstreet, moving 11.9 million units overall. That total represents an 8.2% (or 908k) increase over last week, and 10.1% (or 1.1 million) increase over the same week in 2004. Thus, the year-to-date deficit continues to decrease—it’s now at just 7.2%, which sounds good, equating to -20.4 million units, which sounds not good. Total sales for the first five-and-a-half months of ’05: 261.5 million.