Billboard, Nov. 20

[ed@wente.llnl.gov (Ed Suranyi)]

News from the new Billboard (Nov. 20):

I can now confirm Homeground's news:  _The Red Shoes_ debuted at no. 28,
the second highest debut this week.  (Highest was a pretty big surprise:
Frank Sinatra's _Duets_ debuted at no. 2.)

On the Modern Rock Tracks chart, "Rubberband Girl" enters at no. 21,
while "Eat The Music" has fallen off.

In his column "Chart Beat", Fred Bronson writes a whole paragraph on the
album:

"RUNNING UP THAT CHART:  The second-highest debut on The Billboard 200
belongs to Kate Bush, who enters at No. 28 with her eigth album, 'The
Red Shoes.'  It's her highest-charting album ever in America; in its
first week, it places two notches higher than the peak position of
'Hounds Of Love' in 1985.  Bush's first two releases, 'The Kick Inside'
and 'Lionheart,' never even charted in the U.S., although she was an
instant success in her native England.  She was 18 years old when her
first single, 'Wuthering Heights,' went to No. 1 there; 'The Kick Inside'
was the first album by a British female solo artist to reach No. 1 in
the U.K.  All of her albums have made the top six in Great Britain, where
'The Red Shoes' debuts at No. 2.  That puts Bush in a three-way tie with
Diana Ross and Madonna as the most successful female artist in the history
of the U.K. album chart, according to Alan Jones of Music Week."

Fred Bronson is the editor of the Billboard Book of Top 40
Singles/Albums.

A word about the album charts, particularly for those in Britain who
aren't familiar with the situation.  Billboard changed the method it
uses to determine those charts in 1991.  Before then, the charts were
determining by surveying a representative sample of record stores.
Now, a company called SoundScan actually tracks album sales as they
are purchased, by electronic links to stores' cash registers.  When
this system was first introduced, the chart changed substantially.
Many people complained at the beginning that SoundScan was not hooked
up to a large enough number of independent stores and stores in the
San Francisco Bay Area, for example, both of which sell more alternative
music than other stores.  SoundScan promised that this problem would
be fixed as more and more stores went on-line, and indeed, judging
from the debut position of the album, they seem to have kept their
word.

Here's the point:  In the old system an album of moderate popularity,
such as a Kate album, would start in the middle of the chart, then
slowly move up the chart to peak some time later.  Hounds of Love,
The Sensual World, and (to a lesser extent) The Whole Story all 
followed this pattern.  But with the new system of tracking album
sales instantly, that doesn't happen as much any more.  So, many
albums now debut at what turns out to be their peak positions.  
If the old system was still in use, and the album debuted at no. 28,
we could REALLY be excited, because it would have meant that the
album would almost certainly have peaked in the top 20.  But now,
28 may be the peak.  We'll just have to wait and see.

Ed
ed@wente.llnl.gov