Country Album Chart News: December 26, 2013: Garth, Duck Dynasty, Scotty McCreery, Cassadee Pope, Danielle Bradbery Strong Sellers

Garth Brooks is now one month into holding down the #1 slot on the Top 10 Country Albums Sales chart this week. Duck Dynasty’s fans ensure their Christmas album remains a hot seller too.

This week, we have the last full week of Holiday music sales and nearly every album on this rundown experienced strong sales gains over the past week. This includes Garth Brooks’ Blame It All On My Roots. The 8 disc box set has now scanned over 681,000 units giving it a massive RIAA eligibility for multi-platinum (they multiply discs by sales #s). Not bad for a collection of cover songs. Garth proves that an artist doesn’t necessarily need digital media to sell well in this day and age (and that if you give a compelling product, fans will still buy it).

Sitting at #2 is the “controversial” (it all seems to be calculated by A&E to get more products sold during Christmas to us) is the Christmas music collection Duck The Halls from the Robertson Family. The album moved 132,000 copies this week and is neck and neck with Kelly Clarkson’s yuletide album for best-selling Christmas release of 2013. Sitting at #3 on our rundown this week is Luke Bryan’s Crash My Party. He scored a 44% increase over last week to bring sales to 1.468 million units scanned in just 19 weeks on the charts. His good budies Florida Georgia Line sit next with 1.482 million units scanned for their Here’s To The Good Times album. The album has moved this many units in 55 weeks (and 3 weeks ago released the deluxe This Is How We Roll edition to stores. Sitting at #5 is Blake Shelton with Based On A True Story… The album has sold 1.092 million copies in 39 weeks and features “Mine Would Be You,” “Sure Be Cool If You Did,” “Boys Round Here,” all #1 hits that are Gold, Platinum or Mulit-Platinum selling singles too.

Taylor Swift, Scotty McCreery, Danielle Bradbery lead Second half of Top 10 Country Albums for The Week of December 26, 2013.

While this week still has 3 Country Christmas albums amongst the Top 10 Country albums, we still find youthful stars benefitting from Christmas gift wish lists of their most ardent fans (those without disposable income) and landing in our Top 10 and or Rundown this week. Among those in the Top 10 is Taylor Swift with the nearly 4x Platinum RED. The superstar (the biggest Country/Pop star in the USA at the moment) is also now working on a new record to be released in 2014. Lady Antebellum’s latest album Golden has passed the Gold RIAA certification level and is followed at # 8 by Blake Shelton’s “Cheers It’s Christmas,” also a Gold-certified album. Danielle Bradbery is back into the Top 10 this week with her self-titled debut. it’s moved 86k so far and seems like it could be a strong seller going into the early part of 2013. At #10 is Scotty McCreery’s latest, See You Tonight. The album has now moved 165,000 copies to date and the title track looks like it’ll be his real radio breakout hit, bringing the final component to the star having a lasting career: Country radio success and support.

The 10 Notables include Cassadee Pope’s debut Frame By Frame, and the latest albums from Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban and Darius Rucker!

Notables this week all are strong sales gainers with Jason Aldean’s Night Train and Cassadee Pope’s Frame By Frame leading the way. Keith Urban, Darius Rucker and Hunter Hayes are also big sales gainers this week with their latest albums. All of these albums have sold remarkably well this Holiday season. Darius Rucker’s album -- True Believers -- is nearly Gold.

*NOTE: Due to New Years Day next week, this may be our final Country Albums chart rundown for 2013. If we get the information, we’ll still find time those days to bring you, at least an abridged rundown. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Top 10 Country Albums for The Week of December 26, 2013 with 100 Notable Albums (SoundScan Top 200 Current Albums Chart Placement)*

*Numbers rounded to nearest thousandth.