TEA

TEA TOTALING: Columbia scored its second straight decisive win in frontline share this week, but we expected the TEA contest to be close, and we were right for once. Our reasoning was that Republic was sitting on a shitload of hit singles, enough to make a big pot of TEA, and that’s exactly what happened. If you look below, you’ll see that Monte Lipman’s coalition has four singles on the big board, with Big Machine, Lava, Island and Cash Money all contributing, for a total of around 54.5k track-equivalent albums. It wasn’t quite enough, but they made it interesting. (10/2a)