Celine Dion sold about 120,000 albums last week and hit number 1 on Friday.
But none of the sales included streaming. It looks like pure album sales and CD downloads. It looks like that, but really it’s not.
Most of Dion’s sales came from ticket bundling. She’s on tour soon, and every ticket sold comes with a CD or download. So Celine, whose album, “Courage,” does not appear anywhere on the iTunes top 100, has a one week hit. When sales are counted this Friday, “Courage” will have dropped significantly.
There’s nothing new about ticket bundling. Plenty of legacy artists do it, and the RIAA and all the charts people count the sales as part of the ticket price. But one could argue it’s not exactly kosher in terms of the other artists on the charts who actually sold CDs, downloads or streams independently.
Celine has her fans, and they will enjoy seeing her live, pounding her chest (her signature move) and singing “My Heart Will Go On” with bombast and strings. Mazel tov. It’s all coming back to her now.
Way way way at the other end of the music world, King Princess, the young person who sang on “SNL” this weekend, pushed her/their/its EP to number 87 on iTunes. That’s not a big jump but it’s something considering no one had heard that name before Saturday night.
