Britney Spears’ album Blackout set to be a sell-out

Pop singer Britney Spears, who has been of late plagued by a series of personal problems, including her divorce with Kevin Federline and custody battle for their two children, has now a respite in the form of very good sales of her album titled Blackout.

Blackout is Britney’s first studio album since In the Zone of 2003.

Based on first-day sales, Blackout, which came out on October 30, 2007, is well on way to selling between 325,000 and 350,000 units in its first week, according to estimates by sales and distribution executives at three major labels.

This projection is better than the 300,000 units that sales executives at Zomba Records projected when they took orders for the album from retailers in October 2007.

In the Zone, the last studio album of Britney Spears, released in 2003, sold 2.96 million units, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Media reports quoted a senior official at Best Buy as saying, “Britney is doing better than we thought. Her first-day sales are at about 135% of our
forecast, which means 35% higher than expected.”

A statement from an executive at Newbury Comics said Britney Spears’ album Blackout is doing “slightly better than I expected. I think the notoriety is helping sales because it is creating awareness about the album. The only instance I can think of when notoriety hurt is (with) Michael Jackson, but has Britney been as devilish as Michael?”

In the opinion of Bob Anderson, senior vice president of sales at Zomba Records, based on first-day sales, the album may outperform the label’s first-week expectations. What is more, more, Anderson added, “the first-week sales might have been even better had the label not moved the release date up from November 13, 2007, to thwart bootleggers and digital pirates. That date change caused Britney Spears to miss out on a couple of major Sunday circulars.”

Zomba Records has, meanwhile, revised its sales projection upwards to 330,000-350,000 units, since, according to Bob Anderson, “we have seen a major turn of the tide. The focus is off her personal life and on the music, and that’s where it should be.”

Analysts associated with the music industry were quoted by the media as saying that the sentiment within the music industry seems to be swinging in favor of Britney Spears. One analysts said: “Issues and notoriety have some executives thinking that people are feeling sorry for her and that she is going to have a big record.”

Another label, Trans World, told the media that it expected the album to do well, and, based on first-day sales, it indeed is doing well.

A senior executive at Trans World commented: “The single, Gimme More, is performing extremely well; Britney still has a fan base and they say the quality of the music is good; and she is getting a tremendous amount of press, not all of it good. All of that could add up to a big record.”

In the meantime, a group of former employees and associates of Britney Spears have launched a campaign on the social networking website MySpace – named ‘Be Proactive to Help’ – urging fans to boycott the Blackout album “until she’s better.”