If only for a week we are getting a picture of what the world would look like if superstars ceased to exist (which won't happen) and the top sellers list was a collection of niche superstars. Album sales were down 10% from last week (and sit 2% down for the year), and sales for the top ten look more like the 10 to 20 slots during a summer vacation week. Only one album, the High School Music soundtrack, broke the 100,000 barrier last week, though Kidz Bop 9 was just a few thousand short of the century mark. Much of the top 40 is clustered around 40,000.

The debut by Arctic Monkeys, immediately hailed as a modern classic, sold a sliver of what they did in the UK. Still, 34,000 in the first week is excellent and was the third-highest indie album on the chart, behind Kidz Bop 9 (Razor & Tie) and Nickelback (Roadrunner).

Even though sales were tepid, not everybody is so down. In his weekly email CIMS president Don VanCleave pointed to a release schedule that favors music specialists, "With Artic Monkeys last week and Hawthorne Heights this week, the crowds are starting to remember where the record stores are," he wrote.

It was a slow week in the release schedule. Starting yesterday the semi-popular trend ended. Today Hits announced the begining of a bull market.

"March will roar in like a lion for the bealeaguered biz when Def Jam/IDJ's Ne-Yo proves to be the year's first breakout artist, with his debut album, In My Own Words, set to debut atop next Tuesday's HITS album chart with somewhere in the vicinity of 275-300k in first-week sales."

Victory's Hawthorne Heights could have been #1 if released a week earlier. If Only You Were Lonely is on pace for around 100,000.