Whitney skids, Mariah holds
Whitney Houston's album Just Whitney is in the red zone, on life support and in a free fall. According to Billboard and SoundScan, holiday sales of the new album are so bad that it fell this week to No. 30 after debuting on Billboard the previous week at No. 9. Of course, there was a feeling among statisticians that SoundScan had been scammed in some way that first week, since Just Whitney came out in every other chart closer to No. 15. Now it seems that those lower numbers were right, and the album is headed toward disaster.
It doesn't help that Arista Records has been frustrated with radio, which doesn't want to play any of the tracks from Just Whitney. This is kind of ridiculous, too, since even the average tracks on the album are better than most everything out there. "Unashamed", "On My Own" and "Love That Man" should be naturals on radio stations. Unfortunately, Houston isn't helping the matter with her refusal to do any more work promoting the album. Of course, her early efforts to do that were not very successful. I'm talking about her Diane Sawyer interview and her appearance on Good Morning America.
Mariah Carey is having the same problem with not getting her songs on the air. This is also a bit strange, since Carey has four or five potential singles on Charmbracelet, her latest offering. The main difference between Carey and Houston is that the former is at least selling records - about 130,000 a week, which isn't bad right now. She's stayed in the top 20 for three weeks in a row after debuting at No. 3. (Fox 411)
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