Weekly Music Sales Report and Analysis: 04 November 2015
It’s late again, but what are you gonna do? Here’s what I can tell you about what music sold in what numbers over the last reporting week.
It was a good week for the Canadian industry as both albums and tracks posted double-digit percentage increases over the previous week, thanks to some major releases and someone named “Adele.”
Overall album sales year-to-date album sales are down 2% over the same period in 2014 with physical CD sales leading the way (as usual), moving down 8% from this point last year. Digital album sales are up 5% year-to-date over 2014 while digital track sales are down 4% year-to-date over 2014.
Now, about that “Adele” person.
Her “Hello” singled debuted at number one on the Digital Songs chart with 140,000 downloads sold. That doubles the previous highest one-week download total (Katy Perry’s “Roar” sold 71,000 downloads in August 2013). Her back catalogue also has a big week as “Someone Like You,” “Rolling In The Deep,” “Skyfall” and “Set Fire To The Rain” all re-entered the top 100. Add them all up (and leaving out “Hello”), Adele’s her digital songs posted a 362% increase over last week. And her first two albums did very well, too, with 21 jumping 134-21 (+488%) and 19 re-entered the album chart at #61 (a 709% increase in sales).
Justin Bieber also had a good week with “Sorry” debuting at #2 with 45,000 downloads.
Here’s an odd stat: for the first time this year, five albums sold over over 10,000 units. At the top was 5 Seconds Of Summer’s Sounds Good Feels Good, which debuted at #1 16,500 units sold. It was followed by Marianas Trench’s Astoria at #2 12,000 units.
Beyond that, we have Les Cowboys Fringants’ Octobre at #3 (11,500 units), Half Moon Run’s Sun Leads Me On (#4, 11,000 units sold) and Carrie Underwood’s Storyteller (#5, 11,000).
On the streaming side, it’s this Adele woman again with an astounding/amazing/unprecedented 4.8 million Canadian streams. All of Adele’s other big hits also saw very significant boosts in their streaming numbers.
Over in ‘Murica, it’s 5 Seconds of Summer at the top with sales of 179,000, followed by Carrie Underwood (#2, 164,000), Blake Shelton (#3, 33,000), Andrea Bocelli’s Cinema (#4, 29,000), Another Country from Rod Stewart (#6, 23,000) and DJ Khaled’s I Changed A Lot (#9, 19,000).
When it comes to digital downloads, Adele’s “Hello” sold a record number: 1.11 million. That’s almost five times what Bieber’s “Sorry” sold. Finally, “Hello” was streamed 61.4 million times. No one has even come close to that. Ever.
All figures courtesy Nielsen SoundScan.