Van Halen to Duke it Out With Adele For Number 1 Next Week

It has only been out a day-and-a-half, but sales prognosticators Hits Daily Double is predicting that Van Halen's new album, A Different Kind of Truth, will sell in the area of 180,000 to 200,000 copies its first week. That will put it in a photo finish with Adele's 21 which is looking for its twentieth week at the top of the charts.

The Adele album has been out just one week short of a year, yet it has been blowing away the competition over the last few weeks. It has been running in the 90,000 to 110,000 area per week most of that time but, per the site, there are two huge factors that could push its sales up to meet Van Halen's. First is gift shopping for Valentine's Day which is next Tuesday and the other is the publicity in the run up to Sunday's Grammy Awards where she is nominated in six categories.

Van Halen's sales are actually quite impressive considering how sales of albums have dropped off in the last few years and that their last album, Van Halen III, sold 191,000 copies in its first week in 1998. Figuring that sales have halved in the last 14 years, that means that the interest in the new album with David Lee Roth is very high.

The site also estimates that Paul McCartney's new standards album, Kisses on the Bottom, will open with an impressive 65,000 to 70,000.