Weekly Music Sales Report and Analysis: 17 June 2015
What’s this? On time two weeks in a row? What’s the world coming to?
There are just two debuts in the Canadian Top 10 this week, continuing a rather anemic chart situation. Year-to-date album sales are up less than 1% over the same period in 2014 which physical CD sales 8% from a year ago. However, digital album sales are up 11% year-to-date from this time last year. Finally, digital track sales down.
Of Monsters & Men’s Beneath The Skin debuts at #1 on the Canadian album charts with sales of close to 16,000 units. They were closely followed by Drones from Muse (#2, 15,000) making Canada NOT one of the 21 countries in the world where the album debuted at #1.
And here’s a surprise: The reissue of the Rolling Stones’ classic 1971 album Sticky Fingers is your #7 album this week, selling 2,500 copies.
Omi’s “Cheerleader” sticks at #1 on the Digital Songs chart for the second straight week, with 25,000 downloads sold. That’s up 6% from last week last week. And when it comes to streaming, the Top 5 looks like this: Wiz Khalifa, “See You Again” (#1, 1.77 million streams), Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” (#2, 1.43 million), Omi and “Cheerleader” (#3, 1.39 million), Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” (#4, 1.17 million and Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk”(#5, 1.05 million.) Is this the first time the Canadian streaming chart has had five songs with more than a million listens in a week?
In the US, Muse nailed another #1 with Drones–but all they had to do was sell 79,000 copies. That is worse than anemic. Of Monsters and Men debuts at #2 with 57,000 units while the Stones’ Sticky Fingers reissue pulls up in third spot atih 33,000 copies. These low numbers makes me think that if you added up all the album sales on the Top 200 chart this past week, we might have a new all-time low.
As for digital tracks, Taylor Swift is in first spot with 149,000 downloads of “Bad Blood” while the most-stream song in the US is Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” with 20 million listens.
All figures courtney Nielsen SoundScan.
About the Author
Alan Cross is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 30+ years in the music business, Alan has interviewed the biggest names in rock, from David Bowie and U2 to Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. He’s also known as a musicologist and documentarian through programs like The Ongoing History of New Music.
