Gordon in the morning: Where is Beatles band?

Meanwhile, Gordon is all excited about the Beatles reissues:

BEATLEMANIA is back - blasting the Fab Four back into the Top Ten with a whopping 50,000 sales of their sparkling reissues in just one day.

Woo-hoo! We're with The Be... hang about...

How many sales?

a whopping 50,000 sales of their sparkling reissues

50,000? But weren't there 14 albums released? 50,000 records spread over 14 titles comes out at an average of... well, sales that would make Speech Debelle's pre-Mercury figures look like Elvis Presley.

All of that coverage, and they manage to only flog fifty thousand albums?

Helpfully, Gordon runs the midweek chart, complete with sales figures:

1 (-) Kings & Queens
Jamie T - 17,568

2 (2) We'll Meet Again
The Very Best Of Vera Lynn - 14,092

3 (1) Humbug
Arctic Monkeys - 10,495

4 (-) Ignore The Ignorant
The Cribs - 10,137

5 (3) One Love
David Guetta - 9,458

6 (4) Only By The Night
Kings Of Leon - 8,356

7 (-) Abbey Road
The Beatles - 7,164

8 (-) Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles - 7,002

9 (5) The End
Black Eyed Peas - 6,354

10 (8) Lungs
Florence & The Machine - 6,090

11 (6) Sunny Side Up
Paolo Nutini - 6,054

12 (-) Revolver
The Beatles - 6,048

13 (-) The Beatles (Stereo Box Set)
The Beatles - 5,867

14 (10) Songs For You Truths For Me
James Morrison - 5,798

15 (-) Rubber Soul
The Beatles - 5,239

Now, to be fair, The Beatles albums did only come into the shops on Tuesday, which means that everyone else had a whole extra twenty-four hours to tot up sales, but even so - given that this was meant to somehow prove that The Beatles were the greatest band ever by storming the charts - it has wound up with them looking a poor second to Vera Lynn.

Yes, they're old albums, and the sales figures aren't bad for back catalogue - but the sheer heft of press coverage suggested we were meant to be viewing this in those terms. As it is, their sales are around the level of a Kings Of Leon record nudging its first anniversary. That's about a quarter of a sale per column inch.

Elsewhere: The love of JLS exhibited by Gordon Smart's pages is bizarre, but understandable - quids pro quo and keeping Simon Cowell happy.

The obsession with slowly chipping away at N-Dubz, though, is bemusing. Following on from announcing that Dappy's juvenilia consisted of raps about stabbing and policemen, and stabbing policemen comes a story today, filed by Jess Rogers, which drags up a "secret" conviction:

RAP star DAPPY has a secret conviction for spitting in a girl's face during a drunken brawl.

It wasn't actually secret - the suggestion there was something hushed-up about it just seems to be a simple way of explaining how Gordon Smart's well-resourced reporting engine didn't happen to report the conviction when it happened.

Dappy - real name Costas Contostavlos - had kept the incident quiet.

Now, what he did was a nasty thing, and it's right to condemn it, but what does Rogers mean by "keeping it quiet"? It was in a public court, and he's been doing community service. Admittedly, he didn't issue a press release - but then that's understandable, isn't it?

And - to be fair to Gordon's team - back when this happened nobody would have been much interested. Equally, though, nobody's very interested in Dappy now, either, and yet Gordon seems determined to bring him down. All somewhat curious.

U2: Spinning disappointment into a victory

Hey, you - yes, you. You're hearing all that stuff about how disappointing the sales of the U2 album is, right? Well, it's not true. Or, at least, that's what Paul McGuinness, manager, would have you believe:

"The first week, we think it'll be very close to half a million, a little under," Paul McGuinness told Reuters, following a U2 radio broadcast at a Hollywood record label.
[...]
McGuinness, who has steered U2 for almost 31 years, said the sales decline was "a sign of the times" amid the recording industry's decadelong decline.

"And what people in this country don't realize is that the American industry is collapsing at a far quicker rate than in the rest of the world. In Europe, sales of physical material are holding up far better. They're in decline, but not as rapidly as in America."

Given that the record has also been doing sluggish business in the UK and Ireland, the response to this would seem to be "and?" - even if what he was saying was true.

Last June, Lil Wayne managed 900,000 in release week. Nine Inch Nails counted 700,000 first week transactions - some of which were free, admittedly. Coldplay did 721,000. The Jonas Brothers did over 700,000 sales. The Jonas Brothers, whose audience is the young, tech-savvy, download-heavy young folk who supposedly don't buy music but steal it as fast as they can cram it into their portable terabyte hard-drives.

Still, all those figures were in 2008. Perhaps things got really tough just after Christmas, eh, Bono?

This might also be worrying for U2, though, from today's Times:

Expectations are high for [Faryl Smith's] self-titled debut. The record has led the pre-sale charts on Amazon.co.uk and 80,000 copies have been shipped to retailers in advance of going on sale — more than U2's latest album.

When people are more excited about someone off Piers Morgan Says Opportunity Knocks than a band who have effectively had the BBC handed to them for a week of promotional activity, you might want to think about adjusting your humility ratings.

Chinese Democracy wobbles the ground, but doesn't shake the earth

The first week sales of Chinese Democracy suggests that, perhaps, it might have been better to release the album before most of your fans died of old age:

New reports claim first-week US sales of the long-awaited Guns ‘N’ Roses album, ‘Chinese Democracy’, have reached between 300,000 to 500,000 copies.

The report also claims the album has seen 25,000 downloads through the iTunes Store in the US, though the album won’t show up in the charts until next week.

It's not a bad sale for a new album, but given the circus surrounding the release, and the sort of publicity campaign press people would boil their own feet for, it's not exactly historic.

Oasis head for number one

Having managed to limp to number three in the singles chart, Oasis will have their dignity restored when the album chart is compiled this week, with reports of just under 90,000 sales for the record on the first day.

Let's not put that into the context of being about 40,000 shy of Leona Lewis' first day sale, as that might be considered rude. Or that even Coldplay managed 125,000 with Viva La Diva Locomotive thingy.

And, you know, it would be equally rude to point out that Be Here Now sold 420,000 copies in its first twenty-four hours. It's not that Oasis have misplaced most of their hardcore support; it's probably that the true fans are waiting for the SACD release. Or maybe the SlotDisk.