'Idol' Winner David Cook Scores 940,000 Downloads

by Jarrett Martineau | May 29, 2008 at 03:50 pm | 219 views | add comment

Is there such a thing as going digital platinum?

David Cook's American Idol win is already paying dividends on the music charts.
The 25-year-old singer raked in 942,000 digital downloads in just a week, according to figures released Thursday by Nielsen SoundScan. The numbers are from the week ending Sunday.

Runner-up on the Fox show, David Archuleta, amassed 323,000 downloads in the same period. The next closest Idol contender was Jason Castro, with 64,000 downloads.

Cook, from Blue Springs, Mo., last week defeated the 17-year-old Archuleta of Murray, Utah, by a margin of 12 million votes out of the record 97.5 million cast by viewers.

By contrast, Scarlett Johansson's Tom Waits cover album sold a whopping 5,000 copies in its first week. Ouch.

Scarlett Johannson's "Ouch! That was my ear!"-worthy album of Tom Waits covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head, sold a grand total of 5,000 copies in its first week (h/t). To provide a little context, that means that this world-famous movie star's music attracted two thousand less buyers than a collection of Dresden Dolls B-sides, and about a quarter as many as a pseudonymous Green Day side project. Even in these woeful times for CD sales, that's pretty pitiful.