ONE-DAY SALES:
TURN UP THE VOLUME

It took sales of over 228,000 to make the Top Five of this week’s Album Chart, signaling the approaching peak of the holiday season. And with no competition in sight for J Records’ Ruben Studdard (over 403k) or Alicia Keys (over 332k), or for Now 14, Toby Keith, Josh Groban or the rest of the the current chart’s eight-member 200k-plus club, this week’s Top Five looks like it’ll be next week’s Top Five—though possibly in a different order.

Indeed, if Ruben settles and Alicia evens out, they could possibly trade places. And then too, some of the albums registering double-digit sales increases this week could continue to gain and move up. But we can’t really tell you what's likely to happen at this point, because the holiday rush makes things so darned unpredictable.

There are, however, two albums hitting the streets yesterday that we can tell you something about: According to early reports from national accounts, Joe’s And Then... (Jive) is on track to sell around 100k for the week. Likewise for Memphis Bleek’s Made (Roc-A-Fella/IDJ), though early indications are that it will fall just shy of that mark.

Those two will be joining this week’s 100k-plus debuts, including Musiq (Def Jam/IDJ, #10 at 171k), The Firm’s Westside Connection (Hoo-Bangin/Capitol, #16 at 131k), Avant (Geffen, #17 at 130k) and Big Tymers (Cash Money/Universal, #19 at 124k), on next week’s chart. Where will they land? All we can tell you is that the cut-off for albums selling 100k or greater was at #24 on this week’s chart.

Basically, it all breaks down to a single, time-tested economic theorem, which holds that more sales = happier holidays. How is it we can understand that and still not know whether a Yule Log is something you eat or light on fire?