Weekly Music Sales Report and Analysis: 16 December 2015

We’re well into the Christmas shopping season and with the end of year looming, can the Canadian music industry wring out an increase in sales over last year?  It’ll be tight–and it all depends on Adele and the sales of Christmas albums.

Year-to-date album sales are down 2% from where we were this time in 2014. Physical CD sales are down 6% year-to-date over 2014 while digital album sales are up 4%. As for digital track sales, they’re down 5% year-over-year.

Adele’s 25 is–surprise!–stuck at #1 for the third straight week, selling another 103,000 copies. No artist has ever sold over 100,000 units in its first three weeks of an album’s release. Total Canadian sales are now at 550,000, making it the highest-selling album in a calendar year since–well, look at this!–21 moved 936,000 copies in 2011. And it was released in January that year. 

Normally, selling 33,000 copies of an album in its first week would be enough to debut at #1, but Coldplay had to settle for second place with A Head Full of Dreams. This is the first Coldplay album since Parachutes not to enter the Canadian charts at #1. Give them an Adele mulligan on this one.

Three holiday releases saw big moves.  Michael Buble’s 2011 monster entitled Christmas is at #4 this week with a sales increase of 36%.  It’s followed at #5 by Jann Arden’s album (also called Christmas) with a sales bump of 39%. Then there’s That’s Christmas to Me from Pentonix movine to #6 with an increase of 53%.

The second Top 10 debut is from Troye Sivan whose first full-length album, Blue Neighbourhood, showed up at #9 with 6,300 copies.

As for the top digital track in Canada, it’s Adele’s “Hello” with 16,000 fresh downloads with Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” is the most-streamed song in the land with 3.56 million listens, just ahead of “Hello’s” 3.30 million. It’s also interesting to note that six of the top ten most-streamed songs are from Canadians. We do support our own…

Over in ‘Murcia, Adele is stuck at #1, selling another 695,000 copies of 25, pushing her three-week total to well over five million. (Do I need to point out that no one has ever reached the 5 million mark that quickly?) Second place goes to Coldplay (195,000) with G-Eazy’s When It’s Dark Out debuting at #4 (103,000), Troy Sivan at #6 (55,000) and Ric Ross’ Black Neighbourhood at #7 (54,000).

On the digital track front, the most-downloaded song is…NOT “Hello.” Adele was edged out by Jordan Smith’s “Somebody to Love,” which sold 164,000 files to “Hello’s” 158,000.

Finally, US streams. “Hello” is at #1 with 25.7 million listens, just ahead of Bieber’s “Sorry,” which had 24.6. And looking at the Top 10 streams, seven are from Canadians.

All figures courtesy Nielsen SoundScan.