So this is what the winter blues look like to record store retailers. Until Valentine's Day and the Grammy telecast comes around in February to provide their annual boost to CD sales, business is likely to be rather slow.

How slow are things? For the just-completed sales week of Jan. 16, the No. 20 album (Destiny's Child's The Writing's on the Wall) sold 54,000 copies, according to SoundScan. Three weeks ago, during the height of the holiday shopping season, that total would have put the album at a distant No. 97.

For now, the country's top-selling album continues to be Santana's Supernatural. The record sold 174,000 copies last week, down slightly from the previous week. But the fact is just six albums among the top 100 managed to post sales increases last week.

The most notable of those belonged to Eiffel 65, the year's first big surprise sales success. The pop act's Europop jumped into the top ten, up from No. 23 two weeks ago. Driving sales is the group's ridiculously catching Top 40 single, "Blue (Da Ba Dee)," currently No. 6 on radio, according to Billboard.

The only other record inside the top fifty making real sales noise was the Next Friday soundtrack, featuring Ice Cube, N.W.A. and Eminem, among others. The album climbed from No. 34 to No. 22.

Meanwhile, the one new album of note on the charts was country singer Mark Will's Permanently, which debuted at No. 23.

From the top, it was Santana's Supernatural, followed by Celine Dion's All the Way: A Decade of Song (selling 140,000 copies); DMX's And Then There Was X (138,000); Now That's What I Call Music, Vol. 3 (116,000); Christina Aguilera's Christina Aguilera (115,000); Jay-Z's Vol. 3...Life and Times of S. Carter (114,000); Dr. Dre's Dr. Dre 2001 (110,000); Eiffel 65's Europop (92,000); Backstreet Boys' Millennium (89,000); and Kid Rock's Devil Without a Cause (82,000).

ERIC BOEHLERT
(January 19, 2000)