I received a lot of emails from the ever faithful Idol clan following yesterday`s story about sales of the Wes Carr song in its first week.
The Idol winner sold 8,292 units last week and 8291 were listed as digital sales. (I suspect the one physical unit was an error as the CD has not been released yet).Idol fans wrote in their droves to say that the song did so poorly because it wasn’t yet available on CD.
The point being that if the song was available on CD as well as a download, they suggest it would have done much better.
So, would it?
An evaluation of the Australian top 10 this week shows that 79.9% of singles sales were downloads.
Only one in five Top 10 singles sold last week were on CD.
Expanding that to the Top 20, the stats go even further in favour of the download. 83.5% of sales for the Top 20 were digital last week.
The CD single is fast approaching extinction. It has already obsolete in the United States.
The Top 20 sales added up to 110,715 items sold last week. 92,470 of those were digital sales.
So lets apply the calculator to Wes Carr’s digital sales figure and see where he would have ended up in the chart, had there also been a physical CD available.
We’ll give Wes the 20.1% CD figure from the Top 10 calculation, not the 16.5% of the Top 20.
‘You’ would have done 9958 units if it was also available on CD in the first week AND IF the digital sales figure remained unchanged.
That would have pushed it to number two. It still would not have been a number one.
When ‘You’ is released as a CD single, it will not make any real difference for the Idol winner.
‘You’ on first week sales may very well not even make Gold.
