By Jeff Lunden – NEW YORK — There are 10 original songs on the Frozen soundtrack, including the Academy Award winning “Let It Go,” and the album continues to make frequent appearances in the number one spot in Billboard magazine.
“The Billboard 200 ranks the most popular albums in the country each week, based upon sales,” said Keith Caufield, Billboard’s associate director of charts. “That’s pretty staggering because at this point, we’re kind of in the realm of mega-soundtracks like Titanic, which spent 16 weeks at number one and The Lion King, another Disney movie that spent 10 weeks at number one.”
Frozen has broken the record for an animated film soundtrack. Since it hit the Billboard top five in January, it’s never left, and had the distinction of knocking superstar singer Beyoncé off the top of the charts.
Fifty-eight percent of the Frozen albums sold have been physical CDs, and Caufield says that bucks current trends
“Today you can stream an album, you can play it on Spotify, you can go to YouTube, and you can enjoy music in many different ways that don’t necessarily involve purchasing an item,” he said. “But Frozen has been able to connect with people that want to buy albums and actually want a tangible object to hold and to take home from somewhere because they want to have that memory of the movie, and also the music itself.”
“Every song we ran by our two girls,” Bobby Lopez said. “We had this great focus group that was just our family.”
Lopez says he and his wife wanted to write songs that families like theirs could relate to.
A huge part of Frozen’s overall success is its appeal to girls, says Tom MacDougall, who produced the music in the film and on the album.
“They see a character up there that represents them, not just as a gender, but a situation, you know, that they might have siblings that they don’t get along with or the idea of adventure,” MacDougall said. “They look up there and they see these two women having this adventure.”
Despite its popularity, Billboard’s Caufield says it will be a while before Frozen knocks another soundtrack out of the record books.
“The all-time champ for the most weeks at number one, among soundtracks and, in fact, among all albums, is the soundtrack to West Side Story, which has spent 54 weeks at number one, more than a year on the chart,” he said. “So Frozen is a little bit of a ways away.”
For those who can’t get enough, Disney just released a Frozen karaoke album, which debuted in Billboard’s top 20, and the Lopezes are hard at work on a Broadway adaptation of the movie.