well, to be fair, there's always a 50+% sales drop for almost any act that goes #1 the first week. the story will be clearer in week 3 about whether NLOTH is a true flop. if it suffers another massive drop *that* week, then NLOTH won't ever see double platinum certification in the US.
Well Gibson, I'd like to show you what the top 10 SELLING albums released in 2008 have sold to date:
LIL WAYNE - Tha Carter III : 3 million
TAYLOR SWIFT - Fearless : 2,4 million
COLDPLAY - Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends : 2,2 million
AC/DC - Black Ice : 2 million
BEYONCE - I Am... Sasha Fierce : 1,7 million
T.I. - Paper Trail : 1,6 million
METALLICA - Death Magnetic : 1,6 million
Various Artists - MAMMA MIA (soundtrack) : 1,5 million
JACK JOHNSON - Sleep Through The Static : 1,5 million
NICKELBACK - Dark Horse : 1,4 million
These are the 10 biggest selling albums in the United States from 2008. Only 4 albums in all of 2008 made it to the 2 million mark, and only 1 made it past the 2.5 million mark. Does that mean every album released in 2008 was a sales flop with the exception of the top 4? Of course not. Album sales are declining across the entire market every year since 2000 regardless of who the artist might be.
In 1997, selling over 1.3 million copies of POP in the United States was good enough to finish the year at #48. In 2009, selling over 1.3 million albums is enough to classify your album as a top 10 smash hit for the year! It only took 1.7 million copies sold to crack the top 5 in 2008. Sales in 2009 are already down 12%. Thats means only 1.6 million need to be sold to finish the year at #5. That is where Achtung Baby finished in 1992, at the #5 position based on what it sold during the year relative to all the other albums in the market.
In 2009, the #48 album for the year will probably do about 500,000 in sales, what No Line On The Horizon did in its first week. If "No Line On The Horizon" sales 1.6 million or more copies this year, it will be just as successful as Achtung Baby was in its first year of release. The market environment has changed and EVERYONE is selling less than they did years ago. So unit to unit comparisons of sales for past years and decades is simply inaccurate. How the album did relative to the other albums in the market at the time is the only way you could make comparisons between U2's different albums from different time periods.