Outside of confirming Britney Spears’ “Britney Jean” will convincingly rank as the week’s best-selling new album, early sales projections are not pretty.
Based on single day sales data, Hits Daily Double forecasts a bow in the 115-125,000 range. Down significantly from the 276K opening sum for 2011’s “Femme Fatale,” the projected tally also greatly trails that of recent releases from fellow pop queens Katy Perry and Lady Gaga.
Worth noting: neither “Prism” nor “ARTPOP,” those albums, opened to home run sales. Many, in fact, referred to the Gaga album, which moved 258,000 in its first week, as a flop (via “ARTFLOP”).
With the question of whether “Britney Jean” would debut well already answered in the negative, attention will now turn to whether it can avoid opening at career low levels. That mark currently belongs to Spears’ 1999 debut “…Baby One More Time,” which moved 121,000 debut week copies before going 14x platinum.
