FONJie (aka John Farnham and Olivia Newton) is determined to have the number one Christmas album in Australia next week even if that means giving them away (and they just about have).
6000 copies of FONJie’s ‘Friends For Christmas’ album were spread around Australia on the weekend for the Sunday market price of $2 an album on CD, mailed right to your door.
Under Australian Competition and Consumer Commission rules, the retailer can set the minimum price for a product, regardless whether the sale makes a profit of not. Therefore under ACCC rules the 6000 sales at $2 a pop should qualify as real sales for the next ARIA chart. And if it does industry reaction will be interesting next week.
The merging of John Farnham and Olivia Newton-John into the ghost of Christmas present FONJie is a clever marketing plot and was expected to give Australia a local soundtrack for the holidays. Instead, Buble, the ghost of Christmas past, with his five-year-old ‘Christmas’ album has been outselling FONJie every week except for the ‘Friends For Christmas’ debut week.
Buble, with sales over 11000 last week, sold double FONJie’s figure, but that’s just on chart store figures and over the past four week Buble is around 8000 copies ahead of FONJie in sales.
However, Michael Buble ‘Christmas’ has been placed all over Australia for sale in petrol stations and post offices. A further 50,000 copies are available for sale over this Christmas period for those outlets but because they are not ARIA chart stores none of those sales counts towards the ARIA chart.
Over the next week, Michael Buble ‘Christmas’ will pass the 1,000,000 copies sold in Australia benchmark. That will make it the 12th biggest selling album of all-time in Australia and place it just behind Alanis Morissette ‘Jagged Little Pill’.
Buble’s ‘Christmas’ is already the biggest selling Christmas album of all-time in Australia and by far Bublé’s biggest selling album ever in Australia. While Buble ‘Christmas’ is about to pass the 1,000,000 sales mark, FONJie is edging towards 20,000.
