Music Audience Buying Up New Beatles Album

“The Beatles Anthology, Vol. I” possibly sold up to 1.2 million copies last week, which is believed to be the highest first-week total ever in the record business, the head of EMI Records said Monday. The question is how many of those “Anthology” sales will be formally reflected in figures collected by SoundScan, whose monitoring of U.S. sales is used as the official record industry standard.

Charles Koppelman, chairman and chief executive officer of EMI Records Group of North America, predicted that SoundScan, which will release its figures Wednesday, will report sales of between 800,000 and 1 million. Koppelman estimated that between 300,000 and 500,000 additional copies of the Beatles album were sold in stores, including supermarkets and discount outlets, not counted by SoundScan.

That still gives the Beatles a chance to break the first-week SoundScan sales mark of 950,000 copies set by Pearl Jam’s “Vs.”

Based on an average selling price of between $23 and $25, the album could have generated more than $25 million in the United States alone.

While album sales weren’t monitored by an independent agency prior to 1991 when SoundScan was adopted, it is doubtful that any album approached the $25 million mark in its first week in the stores, industry observers said.

The Beatles package is expected to easily shatter the first-week SoundScan sales record for a double album. The current record of 391,000 copies was set last summer by Michael Jackson’s “HIStory.”