Weekly Music Sales Report and Analysis: 21 August 2015

This is VERY late this week. Blame it on all those mid-August vacations. Have you tried to get any work done lately without getting a ton of “out of office/on vacation” notifications?

There are two big debuts to talk about–that’s coming up–but let’s first look at the overall sales stats.  Overall album sales are up down less than 1% over the same period in 2014. Physical CD sales are down 8% from this point last year.  Digital album sales are up 9% year-to-date while d=igital track sales are down 6% over last week, down 12% over the same week last year and down 2% year-to-date over 2014. Track-equivalent album sales are down 0.2% over last week and down 0.8% year-to-date over 2014.

Dr. Dre’s Compton debuts at number one on the Top Albums chart with 32,000 units–which is an incredible number for a digital-only release. (Remember that you could only get it through iTunes.) It’s the . third highest one week sales total for any release so far this year behind Mumford & Sons and another digital only release, Drake. .

Next we have Luke Bryan’s Kill The Lights at #2 with 22,000 units sold. That’s  the second highest one week sales total for a Country album in 2015, only behind Yoan’s 34,000 sales total in its first week of release. 

The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face” jumps 3-1 on the Digital Songs chart with sales of about 17,000, downloads, which is a 2% increase over last week. Finally, when it comes to streaming, six songs streamed over 1 million times, led by “Cheerleader” by OMI. Every week, the number of Canadians streaming music continues to increase week after week.

Moving to ‘Murica, the Top 4 are all debuts: Luke Bryan (#1, 320,000), Dr. Dre (#2, 276,000), the Now 55 compilation (#3, 76,000) and This is Not a Test from Tobymac (#4, 35,000).

Lana Del Rey’s new single rocketed to the top of the digital download charts in its first week. “Hi by the Beach” sold 248,000 downloads.

And with streaming, 8 songs saw streams of more than 10 million occasions, led by “Watching” from Silento with 20.8 million listens.

All figures courtesy by Nielsen Soundscan.