Weekly Music Sales Report and Analysis: 02 December 2015
This one is going to be all about Adele. But you knew that.
Thanks to Adele, overall album sales are up 45% over last week and up 26% over the same week last year. Year-to-date album sales are now down 2% over the same period in 2014, which is a substantial improvement over where things stood last week. Physical CD sales are up 45% over last week and up 18% over the same week last year but still down 8% year-to-date over 2014. Digital album sales are up 45% over last week, up 42% over the same week last year and up 5% from a year ago.
Digital track sales are up 8% over last week but surprisingly down 11% over the same week last year and still down 4% year-to-date over 2014.
In case you were floating in the Oort Cloud over the last seven days, you should know that Adele’s 25 debuted #1 albums chart with 306,000 units sold, the biggest one-week sales total in the Canada SoundScan era (i.e. since 1995). It blew past the previous record of 230,000 units, set in 1997 by Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love.
With just one week of sales, the album has already sold nearly twice as many copies as the second biggest selling album of 2015 so far, which as Ed Sheeran’s X. And if that weren’t enough, her first two albums also sold like crazy. At #8, we find 21, the second-biggest-selling album in the Canadian SoundScan era, while 19 moved from #130 to #20.
That’s pretty much the album sales report this week with the exception of an Enya record called Dark Sky Island, which debuted #8. I told you it was going to be all about Adele.
As for the biggest digital song in the country, it’s “Sorry” from Justin Bieber while “Hello” from Adele is still the most-streamed song in the country with 3.95 million listens.
In the US, you know the story. Adele’s 25 sold 3,337,885 copies and we don’t need to belabour the issue of how many records this broke. (Go here, if you must.) There were two more Top 10 debuts: Jadakiss’ Top 5 Dead or Alive (#4, 60,000 units) and the Enya record (#7, 46,000).
Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” is the biggest digital track with 172,000 downloads. And as for streaming, it’s “Hello” with 35.1 million listens.
All figures courtesy of NielsenSoundScan
