Clive Davis was right about how bad former American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson’s album would perform with the general public.  Clarkson early this year slammed Davis for his opinion of her album.  She later publicly apologized to him.

Her current album My December, a dark departure signaling the singer’s artistic independence and emotional turmoil, is falling short of its two peppy pop predecessors. In its sixth week on the Billboard chart, the disc dropped six slots to No. 21 after selling 26,500 copies, down 14% from last week’s 31,000, for a total of 562,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

That pales against Breakaway‘s six-week benchmarks in early 2005, when it hit 1 million in sales and sat at No. 10 with a weekly take of 67,000 copies. Six weeks into its run, her 2003 debut Thankful was No. 13 with weekly sales of 81,000 and a total of 1.1 million.

Old white men who have been in the music business for dozens of years are usually pretty right, especially when they can control your marketing budget as well.  I think Kelly learned her lesson this time.  Clive was probably pretty right about his analysis of the album as well.