Weekly Music Sales Report Analysis: 22 January 2014

January 22, 2014January 22, 2014 Alan Cross 0 Comments

Warning: sale suckage factor remains high.

When it comes to albums, the Canadian market is now 6% behind where it was at this time last year. Blame both a 9% drop in CD sales from 2013 and a -3% move in the sales of digital albums. Meanwhile, digital tracks are at -10% and album-equivalent sales (where 10 tracks purchased at the same time equals one album) are down 7%.

Springsteen’s High Hopes debuts at #1–but even The Boss couldn’t convince more than 10,000 people to buy his record. In fact, only 9,100 did. In the whole country. Quebec artist Coeur de Pirate came second with 8,200 units of her soundtrack to a TV show called Trauma. The only other debut in the Top 10 was an 80s compilation entitled Now: 25 Top Hits of the 1980s.

The biggest-selling single in Canada comes from A Great Big World with “Say Something” with 28,000 downloads.

Moving to the US, sales are soft from 2013 by a whopping 14% with physical CD sales down 16%, digital albums down 13%, digital tracks down 12% and track-equivalent sales down 13% from last year. Yeesh.

The Boss debuts at #1 (no surprise) but with just 99,000 copies (wha?). The next debut comes a children’s record called Kidz Bop (#3, 65,000). From there, we have Jennifer Nettles at #5 with That Girl (54,000) followed by Switchfoot’s Fading West (39,000).

The biggest-selling single in the US is “Dark Horse” from Katy Perry (291,000 downloads) and the most-streamed song is Pitbull’s “Timber” with 5,512,835 listens.

All figures courtesy Nielsen Soundscan.