06 Q1 2012 ALL CHARTS, GRAPHS AND DATA IN THIS REPORT ARE COPYRIGHT OF THE OFFICIAL CHARTS COMPANY
The only way is up – but for h
ANALYSIS UK SINGLES
T
he UK singles market continues to offer encouragement at a time of falling album sales, but the uplift in Q1 was less thrilling
than the industry has been getting used to. Sales rose over the three months by 4.4% to
46,661,629 units with the market double the size it was during the same period just five years ago. However, that increase compares to the market expanding by a more robust 10.0% across the whole of 2012, helped by two singles in Adele’s Someone Like You and Maroon 5 featuring Christina Aguilera’s Moves Like Jagger each selling more than 1 million units. The XL-issued Adele ballad claimed top billing
in the first quarter of last year, shifting nearly 700,000 units, while its predecessor Rolling In The Deep added nearly half a million sales of its own. Q1 2012’s top seller Somebody That I Used To Know by Island’s Gotye featuring Gotye produced even better numbers with 742,043 takers by the end of March, but combined sales of the quarter’s Top 10 were 5.1% lower than what the Top 10 sellers had managed to sell collectively during the opening three months of last year. The slightly lower sales for the
market’s biggest sellers is reflected by Q1 SINGLES SALES WEEK BY WEEK IN LAST 5 YEARS
3.5m 4m
2.5m 3m
1.5m 2m
2012 2011 2010 2009 2008
RIGHT Q1 top seller: Gotye with Somebody That I Used To Know
www.musicweek.com
“I would hope to see the
growth rate become higher year-on-year. Obviously,
Gotye has had tremendous success and there have been other markets that
saw a flattening out. That hasn’t happened here” GEOFF TAYLOR, BPI
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7 Week Q1 SINGLES SALES
10m 20m 30m 40m 50m
0 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 Year 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Atlantic act Flo Rida’s Good Feeling, which sold 272,685 copies to finish as this past quarter’s 10th biggest single. Exactly a year earlier the Polydor- handled Coming Home by Diddy Dirty Money featuring Skylar Grey had occupied the same position on the quarter-end chart but with 279,184 sales, 2.4% higher than the Flo Rida smash. Qualification into the Top 40 singles of the quarter fell even more, with 13.9% fewer sales needed to make the grade compared to a year ago. It meant the rest of the market had to work
harder to produce another year-on-year sales lift and it did, adding nearly another 2 million units compared to January to March 2011. This increase was driven entirely digitally with the sector moving another step nearer to becoming download only, leaving the various physical formats to fight over
just a 0.3% market share. All but 142,549 of the singles sold over the three
months happened digitally as downloads’ share of the market rose year-on-year from 99.5% to 99.7%. Within that massive share there was a slight migration to consumers buying digital bundles, rather than just the main hit track. The market for digital bundles grew by around 130% year-on-year, but still accounted for a fraction of the sales enjoyed by digital tracks with bundles only making up about 1.5% of the singles sector. Unlike on albums where a renewed interest in
vinyl saw its sales lift 6.9% during the quarter, the seven-inch and 12-inch single both suffered big declines. The seven-inch market fell nearly 45% with around 17,000 units sold and the 12-inch decreased 7.2% to just under 11,000 units, while a 29.4% drop
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Sales
Sales
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