News

Arcade Fire's 'The Suburbs' Sells 156,000 Copies According To Spoon

8:22 a.m. · August 11, 2010 · by Nick Neyland

Congratulations are due to the Arcade Fire, who are reportedly sitting on top of the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Earlier this week, The Suburbs debuted at No. 1 on the U.K. chart, and now comes confirmation (via the Merge Records Twitter feed, and they should know, right?) that the same feat has been pulled off in the U.S.

Anyone curious to know how many copies the record sold—and, let’s face it, in these testing times for the music industry, everyone’s got half an eye on sales—may want to check out Spoon’s Twitter feed, which claims 156,000 copies were shifted. How did Spoon get hold of this information? That remains a mystery for now, although the two bands have been playing together recently.

It should be noted that many of the first week digital sales of the album were extremely cheap. Amazon was selling The Suburbs for a mere $3.99, and the band had it on sale for $7.99, although such practices are common these days, as this LA Times blog post notes. At the time of writing this post, the official Billboard 200 hadn’t yet been posted, but check this page for confirmation later today.