Call it Beatlemania 2.0.
Based on strong first-day sales of their newly-remastered catalog, the Fab Four appear set to dominate sales charts on a worldwide basis. As reported by Billboard.biz, projections in Britain indicate the band will occupy five of the Top 20 slots when sales charts appear on Sunday. Additionally, as many as 15 of the remastered CDs will place among the Top 75.
“"This massive project has come together so well through a great partnership between Apple Corps and EMI, and several years of hard work by both," said Elio Leoni-Sceti, CEO of EMI Music, in a statement. "The response from consumers from all around the world has been fantastic and simply underlines the pure quality and timelessness of the Beatles' music and a very well thought out global marketing campaign. But this is only the beginning. We're looking forward to building on what has been a really great start."
Thus far the biggest-selling titles in the U.K. have been Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In Germany, the band’s 14-CD stereo box set has been the big seller, with many German retailers reporting stock outages on the first day of sales. The stereo box set is also currently Number One on the Amazon France sales chart, with Abbey Road placing at Number Six and the mono box set at Number Seven.
The remastered discs have also ignited a Beatles frenzy in Japan, with entertainment retailer HMV Japan reporting pre-orders topping 10,000 for both the stereo version and the mono version of the box set.
Indeed, speculation has begun that the Beatles might become the biggest-selling act of the decade.
4 comments:
Doesn't surprise me. It would be interesting to see the demographics of the purchasers, percentage of sales to original fans vs newcomers to the band's music. I ordered the mono mix box set from Amazon. I was in Starbucks yesterday, and they're selling some of the individual CDs. They're everywhere!
I picked up Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper's (my fav CD and my wife's, respectively) today. AR is *fantastic*!
After listening to Abbey Road and The White Album, I went back and bought the rest... except for Past Masters, as it was sold out everywhere around me. So, it's on order.
Dave - Past Masters is as good a remastering job as all the other. Bad Boy sounds huge. These new CD's really show how bad the original CD's were.
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