14 MusicWeek 23.08.13 BUSINESSANALYSIS
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latest set Right Place Right Time already above 800,000 sales and the sixth most popular album by an X Factor artist overall. Just below it in seventh place is his eponymous debut album (around 800,000 sales). His UK singles stats are even more impressive,
standing at 3.9 million presently, the second highest by an X Factor act and just 450,000 behind Lewis. The initiative here seems to be with Murs who has scored a trio of No.1 singles in the UK over the last two years, while Lewis’s last chart-topper was back in 2008. The Troublemaker singer famously lost out to
winning the 2009 season to Joe McElderry but this has clearly not held back his career, nor those of others who were beaten. Three of the four X Factor acts with the highest UK singles sales did not win the contest with Murs joined by JLS (3.4 million sales) and One Direction (3.2 million sales), while four of the programme’s five top-selling album artists did not win with 2008 runners-up JLS (2.7 million albums sold), Murs (2.6 million), 2010 bronze medallists One Direction (1.7 million) and G4 (1.2 million), who were second in 2004, immediately below Lewis. Other non-winners Rebecca Ferguson and
Rhydian have also sold more albums in the UK than X Factor champions such as McElderry, Matt Cardle and Little Mix, while 19 acts have better albums tallies than season one victor Steve Brookstein. Brookstein also has the unfortunate distinction
of having by far the worst-selling first single by a winner. Although his cover of Phil Collins’ Against All Odds did top the UK chart, it only sold around 200,000 copies in total, a figure subsequently beaten by 43 other singles from X Factor artists. However, his lower sales should be put into the context of him being the first series winner, so the programme had still to fully establish itself, while a pattern had not yet been established to release the winner’s single in the week immediately before Christmas, helping to inflate sales during the year’s busiest retail week. Against All Odds ultimately proved to be the
exception to the rule in terms of its sales with the subsequent winning songs dominating the X Factor
ABOVE LEFT Jukebox of hits | Only Leona Lewis has sold more albums from the show in the UK than JLS
ABOVE RIGHT Impossible dream | James Arthur’s winning single has sold 1.2 million copies in the UK
best-sellers list. Five of the six most popular singles by acts from the show are winning singles with Alexandra Burke’s Hallelujah and James Arthur’s Impossible at 1 and 2 joined in third place by 2004 champ Shayne Ward’s introductory That’s My Goal (1.1 million), while Matt Cardle’s 2010 single When We Collide on Columbia is ranked fifth with 1.0 million sales and Leona Lewis’s A Moment Like This (0.9 million) sixth. The only non-winning single to rank this high is Lewis’s Bleeding Love, which is also the only X Factor track to shift more than a million copies in the UK without being a winning single. Six of the nine winning singles so far have
shifted at least 800,000 copies in the UK with the other two exceptions alongside Brookstein’s Against All Odds being 2007 winner Leon Jackson’s When You Believe and 2011’s Little Mix with Syco-issued Cannonball whose sales of around 470,000 are on the verge of being overtaken by their 2012 chart- topping follow-up Wings.
X FACTOR’S HOLY GRAIL OF CREATING CAREER ARTISTS
Below bona fide X Factor stars like One Direction
and Olly Murs are a host of contestants who burned brightly very quickly but then swiftly fell from favour. What has very clearly been shown as the
programme prepares for its 10th UK series is that it can produce extraordinarily successful artists – even on an international basis – but trying to sustain that is so much harder. This even applies to some of the most successful acts to emerge from the show. No one from The X Factor has sold more singles
and albums in the UK than Leona Lewis but since the release of her 3m-selling Syco debut album Spirit in 2007 she has experienced diminishing returns. Follow-up Echo sold fewer than a quarter of the number of copies, while UK sales of her third album Glassheart released in 2012 are little more than one-fortieth of what Spirit managed, according to Official Charts Company data. It has been a similar story with the now-
departing JLS who opened with 1.4 million sales of their self-titled Epic debut, but the second album
shifted 48% what the first one managed, the third album 30% and the fourth just 10%. At this top end of the market the best sales
consistency so far seems to belong to Olly Murs and One Direction. Murs managed to shift more copies (nearly a million) of his second album in the UK compared to the first (around 800,000), while third album Right Place Right Time is already above 800,000 with plenty of life still left in it. Meanwhile, One Direction’s second album Take Me Home has yet to match the UK sales of their first Up All Night, but it has so far already managed a healthy 85% of the debut’s total. Like Murs, Joe McElderry, whom he beat in the
2009 final, managed to sell more copies of his second album than his first, but even more unusually this was via one of Sony’s rivals. While his Syco debut Wide Awake with Sony managed just beyond 100,000 UK sales, a switch to UCJ/Decca at Universal delivered him a far better return with more than 250,000 takers for crossover album Classic. It is by far the biggest-selling album in the UK by an X Factor graduate not released through Sony. A number of other X Factor winners or leading
finalists have switched record companies after originally being with Sony, but none has achieved
SONY’S BIGGEST SINGLES SINCE X FACTOR BEGAN POS ARTIST/TITLE/LABEL
1 KINGS OF LEON Sex On Fire Hand Me Down 2 ALEXANDRA BURKE Hallelujah Syco X FACTOR 3 JAMES ARTHUR Impossible Syco X FACTOR 4 DAFT PUNK FEAT. PHARRELL WILLIAMS Get Lucky Columbia 5 SHAYNE WARD That’s My Goal Syco X FACTOR 6 LEONA LEWIS Bleeding Love Syco X FACTOR 7 KINGS OF LEON Use Somebody Hand Me Down 8 MATT CARDLE When We Collide Columbia X FACTOR 9 PITBULL FEAT. NE-YO, AFROJACK, NAYER Give Me Everything J
10 JOURNEY Don’t Stop Believin’ Columbia The above shows Sony’s biggest-selling singles in the UK between chart week 52 2004 when first X Factor winner Steve Brookstein’s debut single was released and chart week 32 2013 source: Official Charts Company data
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