If Journey wants to ever have a hit album ever again they NEED Steve Perry. This other Steve may sing his ass off and the songs
on the new CD will probaly be great...but it will not sell as well as any previous Journey CDs...mark my words...
Of course I've been wrong once or twice before...but I'm pretty sure of this..I guess we'll see...



This probably won't post, but here is the way I see it....

The reunion cd, Trial By Fire, sold a million copies---with NO TOUR. Considering that most people didn't even know Journey was together, coupled with the fact that the GH cd shot to 10 million copies soon after the summer '99 tour suggested that sales for TBF probably could have been doubled or tripled if they had toured. Instead, you had a band--or lead vocalist, to be totally truthful--that wouldn't/couldn't perform on tour and declined all invitations to perform on something like the American Music Awards...of which Journey was invited to perform at.
On the other hand, you now have a band that is very willing to tour. Judging from the crowd response at the shows, I think most fans will buy the cd when it is released--some of those probably don't even know Perry is gone. So, you should get a lot of the casual fans buying it anyways--totalling maybe 300-500,000 copies depending, especially if word of mouth is good. The added incentive of people wanting to hear if Journey can survive w/o Perry should bring a few in also just out of curiosity. If they get a popular single on the radio like "When You Love a Woman", you will get more fans that happen to like the song buying the cd, pushing the total close to TBF numbers (1x platinum). Then, on top of it all, you have a band that is willing to tour and wants to play live and won't turn down TV appearances or other such promotional ideas......and tours always bring in more sales as you get people at the concert that didn't know there was a cd out, so they buy it.
When you add up the numbers, you should get a figure at least comparable to TBF if not higher after you figure in the sales from the tour to support the cd--numbers TBF did not have, so this alone works in the favor of the new cd as ANY sales because of the tour are more than TBF got. Of course, all of this is dependant on the cd itself and whether people accept it, but advance word from Kevin Shirley is saying it's the best cd they have done in a long time--and better than TBF.

we shall see......
Kevin