Carrie's Double-Platinum Carnival Ride

12/14/2007 Stephen L. Betts   Carrie Underwood’s sophomore album, Carnival Ride, has simultaneously been certified gold, platinum, and double-platinum, with sales of over two million units. Released on Oct. 23, Carnival Ride features the multi-week No. 1 smash, “So Small,” Carrie’s fifth consecutive country chart-topper after four No. 1 singles from her six-times-platinum debut, Some Hearts.  Carrie’s continued success is celebrated in the year-end issue of Billboard, where she lands at No. 1 across multiple categories including Top Country Artist and Top Country Artist - Female (both based on sales and airplay), and No. 1 among Top Country Album Artists (based on sales). Outside the country categories, Carrie also ranks as the best-selling female artist of the 2007 chart year. Billboard also ranks Carrie’s Some Hearts as the Top Country Album for the second consecutive year, making her the first female artist in Billboard history to earn back-to-back honors for Top Country Album. Only one other artist – Charlie Rich, in 1973 and 1974, with his landmark Behind Closed Doors – has ever accomplished this feat. Carrie also scored outside of country radio, where “Before He Cheats” (a five-week No. 1 country single) recently spent 64 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, earning the longest chart run of any Hot 100 single this decade. Carrie will soon release the new single, “All-American Girl,” and is set to welcome the new year with a live performance in New York City’s Times Square on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve 2008 on ABC.