Weekly Music Sales Report: 12 September 2012
The new fall releases are slooowwwwlllllyyyyy making their way to the stores, so we’re still about a week away from better news from the world of music retail. Damn, but that was a quiet summer.
Even though there were five debuts in the Canadian top ten, overall sales are down 6% from last week–and last week was a bad one. Physical CD sales are now running at -9% from last year while digital albums are up (+29%) and digital singles are up +25%. All this adds up to a market that 2% ahead of where it was last year.
The Sheepdogs have the number one record in the country with their self-titled album. It sold a very respectable 7,000 copies in week one, making them the seventh Canadian artist to hold down the top spot on the charts this year.
Coming in second was North from Matchbox Twenty, their first album in ten years (just a tiny bit less than The Sheepdogs). It was followed by Confidences from Roch Voisine (5,000). Other debuts in the top ten include The North from Stars (4,500 copies) and Coyote from Matt Mays at #7 (2,900).
As for digital singles, it’s still Taylor Swift and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” with another 27,000 downloads, a 12% increase from last week.
It’s more or less the same story south of the border. Although year-to-date album sales have passed 200 million units, that’s down 5% from last year. That’s brought on by a horrendously weak CD market (down 14% from 2011) and a week market for digital album album sales (up just 10%) and even weaker digital track sales (up just 6%).
Matchbox Twenty takes the top spot with 95,000 copies. Imagine Dragons comes in at #2 wtih 83,000 units of Night Visions. In third is Lacrae with Gravity (72,000).
Taylor Swift has the #1 download (284,000 purchases, up 12% from last week) and her new single, “Ronan,” debuts at #2 (211,000 downloads) despite not being available until Friday.
In streaming news–something we don’t track in Canada yet–the most-streamed song in the US is “Lights” from Ellie Goulding.
All figures courtesy Nielsen Soundscan.
