Weekly Music Sales Report and Analysis: 21 January 2015

We’re three weeks into 2015, overall album sales are down 9% over the same week last year. Year-to-date album sales are down 3% over the same period in 2014 while physical CD sales are down 9% year-to-date over 2014. However, digital album sales are up 1% year-to-date over 2014. Digital track sales are down 8% year-to-date over 2014.

There are three debuts in the Top 10 this week. Title, the debut from Meghan Trainor debuts at number one by selling 12,000 units. Mark Ronson’s Uptown Special shows up at #3 (4,500)

Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” holds at No. 1 on the Digital Songs chart for the fifth straight week with 44,000 downloads.

Maroon 5’s “Sugar” debuts at #1 on the Canadian Streaming Songs chart with 1.8 million streams.  It’s one of four songs to post over one million streams. The other three are Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” 1.25 million, Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” with 1.24 million and Swift’s “Blank Space” with 1.17 million.

Let’s see what’s happening in the US. Meghan Trainor is #1 there, too, with the equivalent of 238,000 album (“equivalent” because it’s based on a weird formula involving sales, streams and downloads). Of that, 195,000 were pure album sales.

Next up is Kid Bop Kidz with Kidz Bop 27 at #3 (80,000 units) followed by Mark Ronson T #5 (77,000).  Ronson also has the biggest digital track in America (“Uptown Funk,” 400,000 downloads).  As for streams, I don’t have that data yet. Sorry about that.

All numbers courtesy Nielsen Soundscan.