Weekly Music Sales Report: 21 December 2011

So we're into the home stretch for Christmas and as usual, a lot of people having been buying music as gifts.  

Here in Canada, sales are up 17% from last week. Sounds good, right?  But that's actually down 2% from a year ago.  The good news is that year-to-date pacing remains 1% ahead.  

Depending on what happens over the next ten days, the industry just might record an increase in annual sales for the first time in...I don't know how long.

A couple of other notes:

• Physical CD sales are down 6% over last week and down 8% from this time last year.
• Digital album sales are 39% hiher than in 2010.
• Individual digital tracks are also up 39% from a year ago.

The biggest selling album in the land still belongs to Michael Buble.  His Christmas CD sold--wait for it--ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND FREAKIN' COPIES in the past week.  That's an 8% increase over last week and pushes its eight-week total to 444,000 copies.  No one has sold this many copies in Canada in a single week since Shania Twain sold 150,000 copies of Up back in 2002.  Bubbles is having a great time.

Adele keeps selling records, too.  Another 50,000 people bought 21 this week, which means she's sold 850,000 copies in Canada alone.  This album has been on the Canadian charts for 43 weeks.

Bieber's Mistletoe is at #3 (a rise of one) while Nickelback saw a 10% bump in Here and Now, moving it 6-4.  LMFAO's Sorry for Party Rocking rounds out the top 5.

The biggest digital track?  Flo Rida's "Good Feeling with 16,000 downloads.

Checking the US, Bubbles is #1 for the fourth straight week, selling another 448,000 copies of Christmas.  That puts him very near 2 milllion copies in just eight weeks and makes Christmas the third-best selling album of 2011.

Adele is at #2, moving 277,000 copies of 21, a 48% increase over last week.  Bieber is third (171,000), and Lady Antebellum fourth.  

On the digital side in 'Merica, it's LMFAO's "Sexy and I Know It" with 152,000 downloads.

Here's what I take away from all this:  Christmas albums are saving the industry's ass.  You know what this means, don't you?  More Christmas albums by more artists in 2012.

Comments

[Greggory]

I'm surprised more artists aren't doing Christmas albums. They're relatively quick and cheap albums to produce. A lot Christmas songs are public domain. Head into the studio for a few days in July and you're done...