Sales were pretty slow last week with the July 4th holiday. Not many major releases aside from Johnny Cash's American V: A Hundred Highways. Cash was followed by Nelly Furtado's Loose (81,000 units) and India.Arie's Testimony: Vol. 1, Life and Relationships (69,000 units). Interestingly, Gnarls Barkley's St. Elsewhere managed to move up the charts. I'm attributing this to "Crazy" being played everywhere from dentist offices to supermarkets.
Even in death, Johnny Cash is still mighty enough to top The Billboard
200. "American V: A Hundred Highways" earns the Man in Black his first
No. 1 album since 1969's "Johnny Cash at San Quentin" with 88,000
copies sold in the United States, according to Nielsen Soundscan....
...At 9 million units, overall CD sales were down 6% from
the previous week and down a whopping 15% compared to the same week a
year ago. Sales for 2006 are down 5% compared to 2005 at 179.6 million
units. [Billboard]
People thought 2005 was a tough year for the major labels, but 2006 has been even worse.
At the half-year mark, overall CD sales are down by another 4%, on top
of three previous years of steady dips. While industry cheerleaders
have been touting a 77% uptick on download purchases, the bulk of those
are for single tracks rather than albums (281 million vs. 14 million,
to be specific).[NY Daily News]
Did anyone else see the humor in Three 6 Mafia thanking Jesus after they won the Best Original Song award for their Hustle and Flow contribution "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp"? To quote the immortal Riley Freeman, "I'm just sayin."
But on a more serious note, I have to commend the Academy for awarding an Oscar to Three 6 Mafia. It would have been very easy to dismiss Three 6 because it is not the music of choice for White Hollywood and its target audience, but the judges kept it real. I mean, they could have just gone the predictable route and handed another Oscar to the overhyped Million Dollar Baby/Garden State darling of the year, Crash, and they would have recieved little to no grief for doing so because "In The Deep" assuredly made the audience feel lessthreatened. "Its Hard Out Here for a Pimp" is a legitimately good song (It gave me goosebumps the first time I heard it in the theater) and it is no fluke that it won. I also enjoyed the shots of the crowd who were unsure how to react to this whole situation (Jamie Foxx and Terrence Howard aside) and the shout out to George Clooney at the end of the acceptance speech.
In the much maligned history of hip-hop, this may be the most validating moment for it, even moreso than any Grammy award or sales figure. It was hard enough for Halle Berry to win an Oscar, so who would have thought that the Three 6 Mafia could come through and take one for music? This may be the first (and only) time we see anyone accept an Oscar blinged out and rockin baseball hats. I loved it.
And for the record, I thought Crash was a very good film and I loved
every moment of it, but it was overmatched in every category whether
going up against Capote for best picture or theother4films in the
best original screenplay arena.
Recent Comments