A best seller at Wal-Mart no longer a sure bet on Billboard

[Don]

Foreigner's new album was the number #1 seller at Wal-Mart last week. What does that mean exactly? It sold more than 9,000 packages. Where's does that fit into the Billboard chart? At #45.
We saw it already with Eclipse and Mirrorball earlier; Wal-Mart is no longer the best place in town to promote your product if you are a legacy artist. The only advantage Foreigner had here was that Wal-Mart has discontinued their download service before the album released so the band knew it needed to promote it elsewhere if they were interested in digital sales, unlike what happened with Journey and Def Leppard where the digital carpet was pulled out from under them after their releases.

Despite maintaining a presence in Wal-Mart's Top 15 sales list for the last month, DL can't even mange to hit the 3,000 sales threshold to get back on Billboard's chart.

Eclipse can't manage enough sales to stay in Wal-Mart's own in-store top 100 so I'll let you do the math on that one. If you want to make money upfront, the store might still be the best bet for a release but if you want people to actually buy your record it's probably time to look elsewhere.