-Jay-

#23 I will add more info to Joseph's midweek post, bear with everyone

#19 today!

^ Loving the longevity this era is experiencing

That's a great Top 5! My favourite... probably Jump

Looks like this era is going to be a lot of fun, I'm ready!

The bottom 2 I would have predicted! I actually do really like Holidays (evident by my 7) and look forward to hearing it more in a couple of months. I think Fake is a fun and catchy song - definitely an outlier in Conan's catalogue but it is more Lauv's song of course. Interesting that this is so far Conan's one and only collaboration!

5 with supreme taste Looking forward to seeing how this goes!

House Tour, for sure!

What a song! I think it deserved more than #4 in the UK but it's certainly ended up being one of her most well known songs here too. I do hope there's a 'Daydream 30' like there was for 'Music Box' but seeing as that album celebrated its 30th anniversary this week, maybe it's not coming...

In terms of albums, The Supremes had Top 10 albums in the 60s, 70s and 80s! Think Girls Aloud's only chance of a 2020s Top 10 is if they became properly active again and released a new studio album or a new Greatest Hits.

Definitely very strange of her label to not have an artist store for UK, particularly as she did a reasonably significant amount of promotion here! I haven't even bought it (yet) because I prefer a variant that's only available in the US, but I suppose for ease I'll settle for what's being sold here. Oddly her previous label made the same mistake with Caution.

Sad for Zara the album deserves so much more than that. Pleasantly surprised by Perrie's performance!

Midweeks: #1 - Olivia Dean - The Art of Loving (30,727 sales) #2 - Perrie - Perrie (10,259 sales) #4 - Doja Cat - Vie (5,576 sales) #15 - Girls Aloud - Chemistry #16 - Mariah Carey - Here for It All #17 - Zara Larsson - Midnight Sun I don't think Oliva should have any difficulty exceeding 40,000. Perrie's already outdone in her Monday midweek what I thought she might do in a whole week! Doja Cat staying Top 5 looks precarious for her with Sabrina Carpenter and Oasis behind her. Could maybe see Doja ending up at #6 with roughly the amount of sales I predicted. Hard to say with Girls Aloud but I think we could be seeingit sell lower than 2,900. I guess Mariah holding on to the Top 20 by the end of the week is looking very unlikely. And my worst prediction is sadly Zara Larsson 😔

It would require tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, to mass stream the album to amass the level of streaming sales required to make any sort of meaningful difference to its overall sales, unfortunately. 1000 streams makes 1 sale. Without looking too deeply into the maths, I guess even if 100 people streamed the original album in full, it wouldn’t generate 2 sales. So better if those 100 people buy a copy outright and make it 100 sales. A few hundred more people actually willing to buy a copy (who didn’t already intend on doing so) would stand to make quite a difference in where the album chart. It’s just a bit of a tall order to try and convince someone into spending £15/£20/£30 if they didn’t already want to. The sales so far contributing to the #15 position will include a bit of streaming and downloads in the mix too.

The #54 album this week sold 2,905. That's just 20 copies less than what What Will the Neighbours Say sold to be #35 and Sound of the Underground sold to be #42. It seems to be an unusually high selling week though, because a week previously the #42 sold 2,921, which is pretty much in line with Sound of the Underground. So who knows how it'll go this forthcoming week! That's assuming Chemistry even manages to match the sales of the last two. My personal feeling is that the Chemistry re-release has felt a bit low-key compared to the prior two, so I wouldn't be surprised if the sales are less this time. I hope I'm wrong! But I'm bracing myself for it to miss the Top 40 or even Top 50. I suppose in a year in which brand new albums from Jonas Brothers and Maroon 5 missed the Top 100 altogether, it wouldn't be so bad if a Girls Aloud reissue charts. Considering that it's a 20 year album [which, if we're honest, is kind of a niche album outside of the core fanbase that's kept on loving Girls Aloud enough to be spending ~£20 on a cd and ~£30 on a vinyl] - and without a promotional push from an active group.

Victoria Beckham, the tease that you are...!

I actually like this a lot! With every play it's becoming more infectious. Like Liam said, in particular "right now I'm not even about ya" is so hooky! A very good performance on US Spotify so far (#2, for two days) and perhaps more significant to note is that it's already #3 on US Apple Music. It seems like it has a good chance of an impressively high debut in the Billboard Hot 100, perhaps her first Top 10 from the So Close to What era.

AM I THE DRAMA? enters at #1 in the US with 200,000 equivalent album units! (SEA units: 110,000 / sales: 88,000 / TEA units: 2,000). In doing so, she becomes the first female rapper to have her first two studio albums enter the chart at #1. Don't leave it so long next time, Cardi x Bonus track 'Don't Do Too Much' (one of my favourites)

I've updated the "Sales Breakdown" post! I think the Chart Run Comparisons post is maybe a bit too much work to keep updating on a weekly basis, but I'll consider fully updating it after Christmas - probably less time consuming to do that x

Updated!

I’m fairly sure these YouTube Music play counts are partly derived from video uploads on YouTube? So Free Me’s 1m isn’t 1m streams in addition to its YouTube video view counts, it incorporates them. Sound quality, I feel it ultimately comes down to the ear of the beholder, so if someone prefers a particular service and thinks it sounds better than another then that’s totally valid imo. Strictly speaking though regarding specs, YouTube is 256kbps lossy and Spotify is now lossless, so technically speaking YouTube Music is inferior quality. YouTube doesn’t utilise an equaliser, whereas Spotify does (although that setting can be turned off) which may be why YouTube Music seems to sound better to some people than Spotify does (at least, when Spotify was also lossy - I’ve not heard it since it changed to lossless). I’m on Apple Music at the moment because of using a free trial, and I appreciate the sound quality of it… but it’s hard for me not to feel like gravitating back to Spotify once it’s done. I find the Spotify interface, as well as desktop/phone/other device syncing, to be far more intuitive than other services. Apple Music desktop on windows is horrendous. YouTube Music doesn’t have folders for playlists, or at least it didn’t when I last tried it (which I find annoying from an organisational point of view), and neither does it have the ability to scrobble to last.fm (personally important for me) so those are dealbreakers! (I appreciate this is very off topic to launch into this lol)

Ooh she's hitting us with a banger! Looking forward to hearing the full thing... must be imminent now surely!

This was my feeling too after the first listen! I certainly enjoyed the overall experience, but I need some more time for certain songs to hit me.

I regard Midnight Sun (the song) as being a career highlight, so definitely a favourite from this album! I personally think Crush is great too. I think those were solid choices. Pretty Ugly... it's very rambuctious and I do get the thinking behind starting the era with something attention grabbing. That song was only ever going to be a first single or not released at all... I guess a few would rather the latter had happened. I think it's fun for what it is, but if the idea was to start the era off with a quirky bang, then perhaps Hot & Sexy would be my choice. Or just kick the era off with Midnight Sun (song) tbh. What's done is done! Of the new songs, Blue Moon is the gem for me. On the whole I think the album is rather strong. I concur that the release date is a little puzzling - I feel like the album would have hit different back in July.

So far I've heard Zara Larsson (wall to wall bangers ) and Doja Cat (great stuff on there but a little overlong, may need some time with a few of the tracks)