Weekly Music Sales Report and Analysis: 29 October 2014

I actually had this information last night, but I was too wrapped up in watching game seven of the World Series. Sorry about that.

There are five debuts on the Canadian Top 10 album chart this week (we’ll get to them in a bit), but year-to-date sales are still down 5%. Five per cent fewer CDs have been sold this year than in 2013 and both digital albums (-6%) and digital tracks (-13%) haven’t been helping. However, let’s see what Taylor Swift accomplishes with her 1989 album. It’s projected to sell as many as 1.2 million copies in the US along in its first week. We’ll see.

Slipknot enters the Canadian charts at #1 with 5: The Gray Chapter with a decent first-week sales total of 15,000 units.  Coming up in third place is Neil Diamond’s Melody Road (6,600 copies) then Second Sight from Hey Rosetta! at #6 (4,800), Ben Howard’s I Forget Where We Are at #7 (4,700), Logic and Under Pressure at #8 (4,000) and Nostalgia from Annie Lennox just a few units behind that in the #9 spot.

As for the biggest digital track in Canada, it’s STILL “All About That Bass” from Meghan Trainer with another 15,000 downloads.

In the US, Slipknot has their #1 with 132,000 of the new album, followed by T.I.’s Paperwork (#2, 80,000), Neil Diamond (#3, 78,000), Logic (#4, 73,000), Little Big Town’s Pain Killer (#7, 42,000), Pentatonix’s Christmas album (#9, 32,000) and Annie Lennox (#10, 32,000).

Meghan Trainor has the most-downloaded digital track with sales of 143,000.  And finally, the most-streamed song in the US is, yes, “All About That Bass” for the eighth week in a row with 13.2 million listens.

All numbers courtesy of Nielsen SoundScan.