Beyonce broke a lot of rules and records this past weekend. She sold 618,500 copies of her fifth album digitally only, on iTunes, in the U.S. This was from Friday through Sunday night. She comes onto the charts at number 1. Since Sunday, she’s possibly sold another 200,000 copies as well. This doesn’t include the eventual physical CD, which is being manufactured now and will arrive in stores next week.
Target says they’re so mad they’re not going to carry the CD, but Amazon will, and so will WalMart and others. Right now the real beauty of the iTunes sale is that it’s a full price album only download at $15.99. No singles can be cherry picked off of it. There are 14 songs, and 17 videos. “Beyonce” can’t really be a stocking stuffer because it doesn’t exist. (I guess you could put an iTunes gift card in the stocking.)
The Beyonce album threw a death blow to R Kelly, who might have been number 1. It just about threw off the whole chart. Bey pushed Garth Brooks’ 6 CD set to number 2, and overwhelmed Kelly Clarkson.
