Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have exploded all over the Billboard charts this week with Raising Sand. This week sees them enter the Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles chart for the first time at #18 AND #20. Raising Sand also takes the #1 position on the Top Rock Albums chart

Top Rock Albums
This week: #1, Last Week: 23, Two Weeks Ago: NA, Weeks on Chart: 35

Top Country Albums
This week: #2, Last Week: 10, Two Weeks Ago: 29, Weeks on Chart: 69

Top Digital Albums
This week: #4, Last Week: 14, Two Weeks Ago: NA, Weeks on Chart: 9

The Billboard 200
This week: #2, Last Week: 69, Two Weeks Ago: NA, Weeks on Chart: 62

Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles
Please Read The Letter
This week: #20, Last Week: NA, Two Weeks Ago: NA, Weeks on Chart: 1

Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles
Rich Woman
This week: #18, Last Week: NA, Two Weeks Ago: NA, Weeks on Chart: 1

Tastemakers
This week: #2, Last Week: NA, Two Weeks Ago: NA, Weeks on Chart: 20

Billboard Comprehensive Albums
This wee: #2, Last Week: 70, Two Weeks ago: NA, Weeks on Chart: 52

Top Canadian Albums
This week: #8, Last Week: NA, Two Weeks Ago: NA, Weeks on Chart: 7

New Orleans rhythm and blues guitarist Snooks Eaglin died on Wednesday, February 18, 2009. He was 72. Robert Plant was one of Eaglin’s many famous fans.

Keith Spera of the Times-Picayune says:

It was Robert Plant, in fact, who first made [John] Blancher [Mid-City Lanes] aware of Mr. Eaglin.

In 1990, not long after he took over the Mid-City Lanes, Blancher received a call from Plant, who wanted to throw an after-party at the bowling alley. He asked Blancher to book Mr. Eaglin, whom he met years earlier when the guitarist performed at a party in New Orleans for Plant’s former band, Led Zeppelin.

The after-party didn’t happen, but the Mid-City Lanes became Mr. Eaglin’s preferred venue. He played as frequently as once a month.

Read Keith Spera’s story about Eaglin.

Ben Sisario, writing in the New York Times, contrasts how Grammy wins this year garnered fewer traditional album sales than in years past. The article also points out the boost the wins had on digital music delivery, clearly pointing out that music distribution has changed dramatically.

Sisario writes:

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s “Raising Sand” (Rounder) took five awards at the Feb. 8 ceremony, including album of the year, and last week its sales increased 715 percent. That translates into total sales of 77,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan, enough to send the album to No. 2 on the latest Billboard chart.

By contrast, when the soundtrack to “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” won album of the year in 2002, it sold 209,000 copies the week after the awards.

“Raising Sand” made an impressive 27 percent of its sales as digital downloads, a rush that began the night of the awards, said Sheri Sands, Rounder’s general manager.

“On Sunday night from about 8 to midnight we sold 5,000 albums digitally,” she said. “And ‘Raising Sand’ went to the top of the charts on iTunes and No. 1 on Amazon.com.”

(Sales made on the night of the awards counted for last week’s chart.)