Evidently, lots of people decided to pick up AC/DC's Black Ice when they were at Wal-Mart buying their Halloween candy. The album enters The Billboard 200 at #1, with an eye-popping sales tally of 784,000. That's the second biggest debut of 2008, trailing only Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III, which started in June with sales of 1,006,000. Black Ice had a bigger first week than Coldplay's Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends, which started in June with sales of 721,000. AC/DC's tally represents the biggest first-week by a rock album since U2's How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb started with sales of 840,000 in November 2004. It's the biggest debut ever by a mainstream hard rock album. (A pair of alternative-metal bands, Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park, got off to faster starts.)

It's also the biggest debut ever for an "exclusive"--an album sold in only one retail chain. It tops Eagles' Long Road Out Of Eden, which opened with sales of 711,000 in November. Both of these albums are Wal-Mart exclusives. I wasn't sure that AC/DC and Wal-Mart would be a good fit when I first heard about this deal. Garth Brooks and Eagles made perfect sense for the retailer, because those acts all but define the term "mass appeal." I thought AC/DC's appeal was more specific and narrow. This week's debut reminds us (as if previous achievements by Led Zeppelin and Metallica hadn't already made the point) that hard rock is virtually as mainstream as country and rock.

There's a lot of gloom and doom about album sales, but the fact that two albums have had first-week sales in excess of 750,000 in 2008 shows that the album isn't dead yet. This is the first year in which two albums started with sales north of 750,000 since 2005, when 50 Cent's The Massacre and Kanye West's Late Registration both did the trick. (The wealth, however, is concentrated at the top. Black Ice sold more copies this week than the next 13 albums on The Billboard 200 combined.)

http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/chart_ … schoolers/

It's hard to judge these songs because the skipping is horrendous, but so far my reaction has been favorable to the new tracks. Although I hate the first 15 seconds or so of Scraped. That's just god awful sounding.

Yes. All you have to do is record it through a regular cd player with a line out to the computer. I know someone who leaked Oasis' album and that's how he got around the watermark.

Agree with PAsnow. I also agree that Shackler's doesn't really fit in with the rest of the tracks.