Coldplay Sales Boost Industry Confidence
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” will debut at no. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart with more than 720,000 copies sold in its first week, the second-best opening week of 2008, according to the trade magazine’s Web site. Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” was the top album debut of the year after it sold a spectacular 1 million copies earlier this month.
Two back-to-back blockbuster sales are a boost to the sluggish music industry, which has had little to celebrate with declining sales.
“Viva La Vida” follows 2005’s “X&Y,” which also made its debut at no. 1 on the Billboard 200, with 737,000 copies sold in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The album sold 3.2 million copies in the United States.
