The album was released two months late. They were trying to build anticipation but it would have been smarter to release it when CG was smashing and have steady sales through the summer with all the promo.

By the way, LFN really NEEDS to be the 4th single to keep this on the charts in 2011.

I expected Katy to do better considering all the promotion and 2 hit singles. And Fantasia did great..

I don't know why are some people saying 'she didn't have a chance' and similar ****, when Fantasia isn't really a successful artist and isn't a mainstream artist (unlike Katy) and she released two singles and only the second one charted at #79. That's pretty damn good considering she didn't have a real hit.

Her highest position, her lowest first week sales though:
#8 Free Yourself 240,000
#19 Fantasia 133,000
#2 Back to Me 122,000

Congrats to Katy!!!

Her numbers are quite underwhelming though. I thought she would sell at least 250k with a huge anthemic #1 single and a huge second single as well, and all the promo.

A huge progress from the 47,000 copies "One of the Boys" sold in it's first week though.

There was no "big mistake." Katy did typical pop female opening numbers.

That was the dumbest move.

I thought Katy would sell a lot more than that first week. Amazing sales I guess but I expected better with ll the hype.

The industry was expecting more.

From EW:

"Though she did not earn the numbers we expected, Katy Perry comes in at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. Her Teenage Dream set sold 192,000 copies in its debut frame."

However Fantasia does have a large urban fanbase, as does Monica and Keyshia Cole who have sold much more without the help of a "scandal"

They also had long running tv shows on BET that ended the week of their album releases.

Fantasia

Katy - Yep, that's what I was expecting. I mean, come on, she had two massive smashes and one hit from her last album, and it struggled to sell 1,000,000. Obviously for Katy, her singles sell a lot better than her albums do. Like Rihanna.

Wow those are really bad numbers Katy

Fantasia had a recent reality show on VH1.

She would've sold well this week regardless though. Congrats, Fantasia deserves the success.

Expected sales for Katy with an mediocore album .
And imagine if Back To Me had 2 succesfull singles too( assuming man of the house and falling in love tonight, lol), probably Fantasia will do better

Obviously I would know that since I stan for her.... but BET is home to a majority urban audience unlike VH1. Not to mention I said Monica and Keyshia released as soon as their seasons ended, Fantasia did not.

I hope Man Of The House seriously become more successful than Bittersweet. She deserves it and the song is FIRE!

Hey don't mess with the katycats Anyway, it's not like she only has fans in the U.S

Katy

Fantasia