Norah and Grammys Spike Record Sales

Norah #2 has biggest first week of sales of any record in almost three years:

    Norah Jones' "Feels Like Home," the follow-up to her multiplatinum, Grammy-winning debut album, has sold over 1 million copies in its first week, the highest sales debut for an album since 2001.

    No act has posted more than 1 million in sales since 'N Sync sold 1.9 million copies of "Celebrity" in the summer of 2001. "Feels Like Home" was released Feb. 10, and for the week ending Sunday, it sold 1,022,149 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

    "This is the kind of achievement that one can only expect from a truly original, extraordinary artist like Norah," Bruce Lundvall, head of Blue Note Records, Jones' label, said Wednesday.

    "It's not very often that an artist can span so many genres and enjoy such broad appeal. But that's what happens when the music is this good."

    ....The Jones record and the Grammys sent more people into record stores: Nielsen SoundScan reported it was the biggest selling week outside of a holiday season week since it began tracking sales in 1991. More than 17 million albums were sold last week, Nielsen SoundScan said.

    Plenty of Grammy-winning artists enjoyed a spike in sales. OutKast's "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below," which won album of the year at the Feb. 8 ceremony, sold 275,000 compared with 111,000 a week earlier; Beyonce, who won the most trophies at five, sold 99,000 copies of "Dangerously in Love," up from 49,000 a week earlier.

    Luther Vandross' "Dance With My Father," the winner of four Grammys, including song of the year for the title track, sold 58,000, up from 20,000. [AP]

Our Mark Saleski liked Norah, and I agreed with Grammy that Outkast was album of the year.

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Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and former publisher of Blogcritics.org, and former publisher of Technorati.com, which both rule. He is now editor, co-founder, and CEO of The Morton Report.

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Article comments

  • 1 - Mark Saleski

    Feb 18, 2004 at 4:42 pm

    not only did i like it...i might even like it better than the first one.

    the record sales numbers are getting interesting. i saw an article last night (stereophile, i think) stating that sales last year were down only 1%. i'll dig up the particulars.

    (oh...and it's Saleski!)

  • 2 - Eric Olsen

    Feb 18, 2004 at 6:39 pm

    typo - I know the spelling, Marc

  • 3 - Mark Saleski

    Feb 18, 2004 at 10:22 pm

    yea...i guess i'm not famous enough to be in a spellchecker's dictionary.

    ;-)

  • 4 - Mac Diva

    Feb 19, 2004 at 4:34 am

    OutKast is going to feed off that will a movie that captures the same rock-and-roll/R&B sound, set in the 1950s.

    They are also getting a boost from an unlikely source. Polaroid is telling people not to "shake it like a Polaroid picture" if it is a Polaroid picture. The company says the idea is dated. The result is free publicity for Outkast in newspapers all over the world and on the 'Net.

  • 5 - Mark Saleski

    Feb 19, 2004 at 10:21 am

    i don't know anything about how they license this stuff but i would swear that i hear "Hey Ya" in about ten different tv commercials a week.

    and i only watch a couple of hours a week (mostly sports stuff)

    makes me wonder how much money is involved.

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