Weekly Music Sales Report and Analysis: 12 February 2014
With a Super Bowl bump for Bruno Mars and lingering glow from the Grammy Awards, it wasn’t a bad week for the Canadian and US music markets, although there’s still a lot of ground to be made up on both sides of the border.
Year-to-date sales are down 6% in Canada, dragged lower by the inexorable decline in CD sales, which are down 5% over 2013. Digital albums didn’t help much, running 8% cool over last year and digital tracks are down by 10%.
Bruno Mars’ Unorthodox Jukebox vaulted 10-1 on the strength of his Super Bowl performance with a 100% increase in sales. That puts it ahead of the debut Broken Bells’ After the Disco (#2, 5,700 units) and the other Top 10 debut, Little Mix and Salute (#7). Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” is still the top download with 25,000 new purchases over the last week.
In the US, there were four new entries in the Top 10 but year-to-date album sales are down a whopping 15%. CDs are down by 18% and digital tracks are down 11%. Imagine how bad it would be without the Super Bowl or the Grammys, huh?
The Now 49 compilation debuts at #1 with 98,000 copies followed close behind by Bruno’s Unorthodox Jukebox at #3. The record hasn’t been this far up the charts in 11 months. Love, Marriage & Divorce from Toni Braxton and Babyface starts like at #4 with 67,000 copies with Broken Bells at #5 (44,000) and Little Mix (#6, 43,000).
The #1 digital track is “Dark Horse” from Katy Perry for the fifth week in a row (291,000 downloads this past week) and the most-streamed song in America (a stat not released in Canada) is “Say Something” by A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera with 6,293,847 streams.
All numbers courtesy Nielsen Soundscan.
