Week Ending July 19, 2009: Daughtry Makes "Idol" History
by Paul Grein
Daughtry's sophomore album, Leave This Town, enters The Billboard 200 at #1. This makes the band's leader, Chris Daughtry, the first American Idol alumnus to land back-to-back #1 albums. Daughtry rang the bell for two weeks in early 2007. Kelly Clarkson is the only other Idol alum to notch two #1 albums, and hers weren't consecutive. She topped the chart with her first and fourth albums. This obviously makes Chris Daughtry the first Idol alum who didn't win the competition to land two #1 albums. (Clay Aiken is the only other non-winner to land a #1 album, though Adam Lambert is likely to join this little club.)
Leave This Town is Daughtry's first album to debut in the top spot. Daughtry bowed at #2 in November 2006. It first hit #1 in its ninth week. Daughtry has sold 4,494,000 copies. Of the thousands of albums that have been released in the nearly three years since Daughtry, only one other (Josh Groban's Noel) has reached the 4 million mark in sales. (Taylor Swift, which has also topped the 4 million mark, was released a month before Daughtry.)
Leave This Town sold 269,000 copies in its first week, a little less than Daughtry, which had first-week sales of 304,000. (The softening of music sales in the past three years easily accounts for the difference.) It's common for debut albums by Idol alums to open with big numbers. The real test is how their second albums open. Only one sophomore album by an Idol album started with a bigger tally than Daughtry managed this week. Carrie Underwood's Carnival Ride debuted with sales of 527,000 in October 2007. (Kelly Clarkson's sophomore album, Breakaway, opened with sales of 250,000 in December 2004. Clay Aiken's A Thousand Different Ways started with 211,000 in September 2006.)
The total for Daughtry's album includes nearly 63,000 digital copies. That makes it the week's #1 Digital Album. Daughtry was also #1 on this chart in its first week of release, though with a much smaller total (12,000), which dramatizes the growth in this field in the past three years.