Christian Album Sales – Week of 10/25/2011

There weren’t any notable new releases from Christian musicians that charted last week. Some Christmas music is starting to chart. But since this is my second week in a row tracking these stats, and since weekly sales from Christian outlets are included in the weekly numbers but not the totals, I can do some comparisons and show you how many sales from each artist happened in the mainstream. After a couple weeks of data for some of the older still-charting albums I should be able to estimate what their real sale totals are.

Artist	Album	Rk	This Week	Total	Real Total	MS%
Casting Crowns	Come To The Well	10	29613	59818	129081	46.30%
Chris Tomlin	Glory In The Highest: Christmas Songs Of Worship	43	8703	95922	103641	11.30%
Various	WOW Hits 2012	45	8482	19011	24354	37.00%
Casting Crowns	Until The Whole World Hears	69	6063	303831	309042	14.10%
Switchfoot	Vice Verses	85	5047	60217	61550	73.60%
Mandisa	What If We Were Real	95	4497	33895	37844	12.18%
Civil Wars	Barton Hollow	101	4414	199603	199603	100%
Various	WOW Christmas 2011	146	3422	3411	6034	56.50%
Needtobreathe	Reckoning	157	3209	69587	70180	81.50%
Skillet	Awake	159	3181	636431	3181	89.50%
Various	Courageous	166	3132	1507	7114	21.10%
Mat Kearney	Young Love	180	2930	97227	97337	96.20%
Kirk Franklin	Hello Fear	191	2794	370603	370908	89.10%
tobyMac	Christmas In Diverse City	197	2721	2678	5097	52.50%

The new album from Casting Crowns dropped from 2 to 10, and they’re still getting about half their sales from Christian outlets. The Christmas album from Chris Tomlin only added 11% of last week’s sales to the totals, so it’s possible that it’s nearing a million total sales. I’m actually surprised that Switchfoot seems to be getting a quarter of their sales from the Christian market. If that number stays consistent over the next few weeks it would suggest that their real total so far is closer to 80,000 than 60,000.

The Civil Wars are getting 100% of their sales added to the totals, suggesting that they’re not being sold in Christian outlets at all – not surprising, but I was curious enough to track it due to Joy Williams’s history in the Christian market. They will cross 200,000 in sales next week, a very modest success and probably more than all of Joy Williams’s old stuff put together (although I have no numbers on that). Mat Kearney appear to be getting a small number of sales from Christian outlets, which suggests that a couple references of the word ‘hell’ did not get him banned from all those bookstores.