Weekly Music Sales Report and Analysis: 11 November 2015

Man, that Adele record cannot get here fast enough. Music sales continue to linger in the weeds for 2015.

Even with three debuts in the Canadian Top 10, overall album sales are down 3% from this point in 2014. Then again, it was a year ago that Taylor Swift’s 1989 was released, so there was bound to be some, er, disparity (-25% from this same week last year!) The industry should more than make up for that next week when Adele’s 25 album finally goes on sale.

Looking at some other numbers, physical CD sales are down 9% from 2014 while digital albums have risen only 4%. As for digital tracks, they’re down 4% from last year.

While no new release debuted at #1 (the Francophone various artists collection called Forever Gentlemen vaulted 6-1), we did see Eric Church’s surprise record, Mr. Misunderstood starts life at #3 (5,600 units). A re-entry, Chris Stapleton and Traveller, shows up at #6 (4,300) while Def Leppard’s self-titled record made it to #10 (3,200).

If Adele’s “Hello” wasn’t at #1 on the downloads chart, it would be a sign of the Apocalypse. Fear not, though, all is right with the world and the universe as it sold another 73,000 (!!!) downloads. It’s also the most-streamed song EVER in Canada with 5.29 million in just the last week. Wow.

In the US, Chris Stapleton screamed from #132 to #1, selling 153,000 copies of Traveller. Eric Church debuted at #3 (71,000), the Now 56 comp at #4 (58,000), Def Leppard at #5 (30,000), the We Love Disney comp at #7 (26,000), Wiped Out from The Neighbourhood (#8, 20,00), some guy named Elvis Presley with a record called If I Can Dream at #9 (19,000) and Chris Janson’s Buy Me a Boat at #10 (18,500).

As for individual songs, it’s all Adele. She sold 635,000 fresh downloads of “Hello” while streaming the song 42.7 million times. That’s over 100 millions streams in just two weeks.

All figures courtesy Nielsen SoundScan.