Dixie Chicks New CD, Taking The Long Way, Breaks Records

James Joyner @ Gone Hollywood | Wednesday, May 31, 2006

The Dixie Chicks’ new album, “Taking The Long Way” has debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, breaking their own record.

As Taking The Long Way debuts at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 best-selling albums chart this week, with first week’s sales of 525,829, the Dixie Chicks have become the first female group in chart history to have three albums debut at #1, breaking the record the Chicks established in 2002 when the group’s last studio album, Home, debuted at #1 and made them the first female group ever to have two albums debut at #1.

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Taking The Long Way arrives in the midst of an incredible media blitz surrounding the Dixie Chicks, who were honored with a profile on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and appeared on the cover of Time magazine an unprecedented two times in May. The group was featured in a five-part series of interviews, culminating with an SRO live concert at New York’s Bryant Park on Friday, May 26, on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The Dixie Chicks will sit down for an in-depth interview on “Larry King Live” tonight, Wednesday, May 31.

Now records for “female group” are somewhat dubious, much like Brooks & Dunn’s numerous achievements as “vocal duo.” Those are very small categories and there’s not much competition currently or historically in either.

Still, having three consecutive albums debut at #1 is an impressive enough achievement. Even more so considering how much the Chicks alienated their fan base three years ago with a series of derogatory comments about a then-wildly popular President Bush.

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Comments

Just to be clear, this is a press release. And having written more than one press release, I understand about emphasizing the positive and ignoring the negative.

The “record breaking” third #1 debut by a female group is valid (though slice the definition fine enough and everyone is record breaking in something). But the number two album debuted at #1 with sales of 780,000 while this album debuted with 526,000. http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002610727 Rascall Flatts showed that it was certainly possible to debut an album with higher sales in April of this year at 722,000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rascal_Flatts .

So the record breaking is not at financially successful as their pre- foot insertion/speaking truth to power. The real question is the total sales of the album. The record company doesn’t care if the DC are selling to country music fans or Kos Kids, but they do care about total sales. So if the DC drop like a stone in sales, expect this to be pointed out to artists who may think that insulting their fans is the way to stardom. If the sales remain strong, expect a string of similar episodes, but they likely won’t be as successfull as the ’shock value’ won’t be as great.

Posted by yetanotherjohn | June 1, 2006 | 10:19 am | Permalink

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