Madonna ‘Rebel Heart’ will be the “hit of miss” moment for the pop superstar.
It isn’t expected to be a disaster on the scale of Mariah Carey’s Me, I Am Mariah…The Elusive Chanteuse, but Madonna needs to have decent sales for Rebel Heart to prove that she is still a force in the music business.
The new album has had a fairly bumpy road getting to today’s release, with the leaking of a number of tracks late last year that led to a number of the album’s songs being released early digitally. How this will hurt the sales of the full album is unknown but, according to Roger Friedman at Showbiz411, first day sales are appearing to be soft with Rebel Heart only at number 4 on Amazon and 8 on iTunes.
The singer’s last album, MDNA, did debut at number 1 with 359,000 copies sold, but much of that was attributed to albums given away with ticket sales for her associated tour and, it its second week, the album’s sales dropped 90%, a record for the Soundscan era.
What would constitute a good opening? Anything short of 150,000 to 250,000 would be a big disappointment and that is certainly looking to be very much a long shot based on initial chart position. To be fair, Madonna’s sales, like much of the record industry, have been trailing off over the last decade or so and have started to mean less in overall artist success with touring being a much bigger money maker, but that doesn’t mean that a certain level isn’t expected for legacy artists of Madonna’s level.
For the record, the approximate U.S. sales totals for each of Madonna’s studio albums:
Madonna (1983) – 5,000,000
Like a Virgin (1984) – 10,000,000
True Blue (1986) – 7,000,000
Like a Prayer (1989) – 5,000,000
Erotica (1992) – 1,893,000
Bedtime Stories (1994) – 2, 312,000
Ray of Light (1998) – 4,359,000
Music (2000) – 2,925,000
American Life (2003) – 680,000
Confessions on the Dance Floor (2005) – 1,703,000
Hard Candy (2008) – 774,000
MDNA (2012) – 539,000
Rebel Heart (2015) – ???
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