Keith Caulfield with "Billboard" magazine noted that Paisley was at a disadvantage releasing the album the same week as Lady Gaga's "Born This Way", which was expected to sell up to one million copies. Cualfield stated, "With all this talk about Gaga, you've got to feel a little bad for country superstar Brad Paisley, whose "This Is Country Music" album will likely debut in the runner-up slot next week with maybe 150,000 copies sold. Paisley has yet to earn a No. 1 album -- after six top 10s, two of which hit No. 2. (Had his new album come a week earlier, perhaps he could have secured his first No. 1.)" As of November 23, 2011, the album has sold 561,000 copies in the US. Upon its release, "This Is Country Music" received critical acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 82, based on 11 reviews. This indicates "universal acclaim". Chris Willman of "Entertainment Weekly" gave the release an 'A'. He stated that "the whole record plays like a best-of sampler — not just for Paisley, but for the history of the art form". Jody Rosen of "The New York Times" was in high praise of the album, saying "Mr. Paisley is once again preaching to his choir. It’s a bright, brisk record, packed with the polished country-pop songs that Mr. Paisley’s devotees have come to expect. It’s a study in the politics of 21st-century Nashville stardom, the delicate maneuvering that a performer like Mr. Paisley must do to keep his pews filled. But listen closely and you hear some surprises — and a more expansive definition of country music than the album’s title track at first suggests". In his consumer guide for MSN Music, critic Robert Christgau complimented Paisley's songcraft as "undiminished [...] he remains the smartest and nicest guy in his world", and gave the album an A- rating. indicating "the kind of garden-variety good record that is the great luxury of musical micromarketing and overproduction". Robert Silva of About.com gave the album four stars out of five and wrote that it "aims to cover all its musical bases", which is done with some "clever songwriting".