04 Q1 2012 ALL CHARTS, GRAPHS AND DATA IN THIS REPORT ARE COPYRIGHT OF THE OFFICIAL CHARTS COMPANY
All about Adele... even now
ANALYSIS UK ALBUMS
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A
t some point in the future Adele and the team behind her will have to face up to the daunting task of following up the record-
breaking 21. For the rest of the record industry that
challenge hit home in the first quarter of 2012 as it tried to cope with the near impossible job of competing with an opening three months of last year when the former Brit School student sold a staggering 2.2 million albums. The best the market could offer to compete
with Adele was, well, Adele whose second album more than a year after it was first released still had enough fuel left in the tank to finish as the biggest seller of Q1. Its continuing success in a quarter when she won six Grammy awards and two Brits has got to such a point now that Martin Mills, chairman of her record company XL’s parent group XL Beggars, says he simply has nothing more to say on the matter. “Everything that can be said has been said,” he argues.
CUMULATIVE TOTAL
Of course, given how long the album had been out 21 was never going to match its sales of 1,754,319 achieved in the opening quarter of last year when it was first released and it was frankly impressive enough that it managed to sell another 412,000 copies in this quarter just gone, taking its cumulative UK sales total beyond 4 million units. But that meant the top-selling album of Q1
2012 sold around 1.3 million fewer copies than the top-selling album of Q1 2011 did – admittedly they were the same album – and this had a devastating effect on the overall year-on- year comparison between the two quarters. As a result the albums market dropped 14.7%
to 23,018,808 units, according to Official Charts Company statistics, with the artist albums market taking the brunt of this as it dropped 17.1%
2m 4m 6m 8m 10m
0 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 Year ARTIST ALBUM SALES FOR THE QUARTER
5m 10m 15m 20m 25m 30m
0 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 Year 2009 2010 2011 2012 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
compared to the same quarter last year. Some 18,367,070 artist albums were sold in the three months, around 3.8 million fewer than during Q1 2011 and a 34.0% drop on the same period five years ago. All of this loss has been down to the decline of
the CD whose album sales dropped a further 25.4% year-on-year in Q1, an unprecedented fall for a format that has dominated the market for two decades. Some 15,318,632 albums were sold
COMPILATION SALES FOR THE QUARTER
on CD between January and March, compared to around 20.5 million over the same timeframe last year, which meant CD’s share of overall album sales dropped to 66.5%. But it was not all misery as at the same time
digital’s share grew to a new high of 33.1% with this sector rising by 19.6% year-on-year to 7,615,583. It added up to nearly one in every three albums sold during the quarter being a download, compared to around one in five 12 months earlier, but as encouraging as the surge in business in this market was it was not enough to offset the steep drop in CD sales. “I don’t think there were too many surprises in
the quarter,” suggests Universal commercial division managing director Brian Rose. “Artist album sales were clearly affected by the non- Adele effect, which we knew was going to happen. I thought in terms of positives we had Lana Del Rey, which is the biggest new release of the year. It was equally good to see Emeli Sande coming through and who also sold some strong volume and it was good to see continued digital growth.” Given CD’s decline and digital’s rise, BPI chief
executive Geoff Taylor describes Q1 “as a mixed picture as was probably expected”. “Q1 in 2011 obviously had the album 21
selling bucketloads and therefore comparisons are difficult and it’s no surprise overall we’re down,” he says. “I also think the release schedule this year in Q1 hasn’t been as strong; it looks better the rest of the year. Lana Del Rey has done well, but there were not as many big albums. Last year we had not just Adele, but Chase & Status, Jessie J, Bruno Mars, Elbow.” In reply this year’s Q1 new release schedule
had not only Del Rey’s Polydor debut Born To Die but also first albums from Virgin’s Emeli Sande, Decca’s Military Wives and Mercury’s
Sales Sales
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