It was a big week for the music business, with strong showings on the charts by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, who reached No. 3 with 363,000 copies of "Crunk Juice" (TVT), and the "American Idol" star Clay Aiken, whose "Merry Christmas With Love" (RCA) sold 270,000 copies, which Billboard calls the biggest first-week showing for a holiday album since SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991.
There were conventions, live shows and repeat showings.
Exports contributed 43%, one of the strongest showings in any recent economic recovery (see chart 1).
Under the auspices of the Weinsteins, it did a decent $10m in the US, putting it 25th on their highest-grossing foreign language film chart, but a storming take in Germany ($79m), plus strong showings in Spain, Italy, Japan, South Korea and beyond, took it to $419m worldwide: 148th on the all-time box-office chart, the highest for a film not in English, if you discount The Passion of the Christ.
For example, Gravity, which is above it in the chart, achieved an average of £4,360, but that would be from a typical 12 showings, four a day, across the three-day weekend.
May 29-30: showings by various choreographers.
The former X Factor band JLS remain favourites to top the singles chart this week, with Love You More, but industry insiders expect some of the most popular Beatles songs to creep into the top 10, over forty years after they were first releasedLast night, Hey Jude, Let It Be and Twist And Shout were making early showings in the iTunes charts.
Job description: I organize and schedule showings.
Daytime showings are free; £3 from 5pm.
