18 MusicWeek 17.01.14 BUSINESSANALYSIS US MARKET IN 2013 Although 2013’s biggest singles could more than
match the demand attracted by the equivalent leading sellers in 2012, this was not true in the albums market. Only one album during the year sold above 2 million copies, Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience with 2.4 million purchases, compared to two the year before with Adele’s 21 and Taylor Swift’s Red shifting 4.1 million and 3.1 million units respectively during 2012. In 2011 four albums sold more than a couple of million units, while back in 2007 nine reached the landmark. The nearest album to Timberlake’s total was
Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2 with 1.7 million copies sold, but below the top two titles sales of the rest of the year’s Top 10 sellers compared favourably with the corresponding titles in 2012. Bruno Mars’ Unorthodox Jukebox was 2013’s fifth most popular album with 1.4 million copies sold, around 60,000 units more than One Direction’s Take Me Home managed to finish in the same position in 2012, while Jay Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail was 10th for 2013 with 1.1 million sales, 75,000 above 2012’s 10th top seller Night Train by country star Jason Aldean. A further indication that even in this era of one-
track dominance and ever-rising streaming activity an album can still deliver big is illustrated by Beyonce’s self-titled set. Despite only being released 18 days before the end of the year and initially just available on iTunes, it shifted enough copies (1.3 million) to finish as the year’s eighth top seller and has since already outsold its 2011’s predecessor 4. By the end of last year it had also incredibly worked its way to ninth position on Nielsen’s chart of the biggest-selling digital albums of all time, a list headed by three British albums – Adele’s 21 (3.0
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ABOVE High once more: Mumford & Sons were one of the biggest UK acts in the US in 2013
million sales) and Sigh No More (1.7 million) and Babel (1.3 million) by Mumford & Sons. Beyonce alone, of course, could do little to prevent
what was a further acceleration of the decline of the US albums market with the 8.4% overall fall compared to one of 4.4% in 2012 and sales remarkably going up by 1.3% in 2011 thanks in large part to Adele’s 21 attracting 5.8 million buyers. The 2013 sales fed into what Nielsen and
Billboard call overall album sales with TEA (track equivalent sales). This combines the albums and singles market with every 10 one-track downloads
UK ACTS MAKE POSITIVE IMPACT ON US CHART
UK acts were behind a record four of the five biggest albums in the US in 2012. But 12 months later they were completely absent from the year-end Top 10. It was their first barren year from the top table in six
years, since when at least one of the 10 biggest annual sellers had been British. Coldplay flew the flag in 2008, Susan Boyle in 2009 and 2010 when she was then joined by Sade, while Adele and Mumford & Sons made appearances in 2011 and 2012 with the latter year’s showing further boosted by a double One Direction onslaught. Mumford & Sons just missed out on making the cut
for a third successive time in the year just gone, providing the highest-ranking British album on 2013’s annual best sellers with Babel finishing in 11th position. The fourth best seller of 2012 with nearly 1.5 million sales, it sold a further 1.1 million copies the following year as it was named Grammy Album of the Year and returned to the top of the weekly Billboard 200 chart. All this took its cumulative US sales to just short of 2.6 million units, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Just behind Mumford & Sons in the 2013 rankings were
One Direction whose Midnight Memories sold nearly 1.1 million copies in five weeks to sit as No 12 for the year. Their third album to debut at No 1 in the US out of their first three releases – a new record for a group – it followed debut Up All Night sitting at No 3 on the 2012 annual chart and follow-up Take Me Home at No 5. One Direction were also the biggest-selling UK album
artists overall in the States last year with nearly 2 million sales, made up of Midnight Memories (1.1 million), Take Me Home (around 555,000) and Up All Night (312,000). This meant they were only outsold during the course of the year by Justin Timberlake (3.4 million sales), country star Luke Bryan (2.7 million) and Eminem (2.5 million) with Mumford & Sons ranked ninth after selling 1.5 million albums. As with albums, no UK acts appeared on the year’s Top
10 singles chart for the first time since 2007, although several tracks produced some impressive numbers, including Passenger’s Let Her Go with 2.0 million sales by the end of 2013 when it was still in the weekly Billboard Hot 100 chart. Other UK successes included I Need Your Love by Calvin Harris featuring Ellie Goulding, Goulding’s Burn and One Direction smashes Story Of My Life and Best Song Ever, which all sold around a million copies during the year. Although British artists were absent, the UK was represented in the year-end singles Top 10 by songwriter Justin Parker who co-penned the year’s 10th top seller Stay by Rihanna and its co-writer Mikky Ekko. It was also 2013’s third favourite radio track behind Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines and Justin Timberlake’s Mirrors, while LA-based UK songwriter Alex da Kid’s co-written and co-produced Radioactive by Imagine Dragons was the year’s third top seller and seventh on the year-end airplay chart. Among specialist radio, Mumford & Sons’ I Will Wait was 2013’s ninth favourite track on adult contemporary stations and 10th on alternative/mainstream rock where Muse’s Madness ranked at No 5.
BIGGEST-SELLING ALBUMS BY UK ACTS IN US
YEAR ARTIST TITLE LABEL (POSITION IN ANNUAL CHART) 2005 COLDPLAY X&Y Capitol (5) 2006 JAMES BLUNT Back To Bedlam Custard/Atlantic (6) 2007 THE BEATLES Love Apple/Capitol (14) 2008 COLDPLAY Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends Capitol (2) 2009 SUSAN BOYLE I Dreamed A Dream Syco/Columbia (2) 2010 SUSAN BOYLE The Gift Syco/Columbia (2) 2011 ADELE 21 XL/Columbia (1) 2012 ADELE 21 XL/Columbia (1) 2013 MUMFORD & SONS Babel Gentleman Of The Road/Glassnote (11) Source: Nielsen SoundScan
2013 US ALBUM SALES BY GENRE
ROCK 34.8% (33.9%) R&B 17.5% (15.9%) ALTERNATIVE 17.4% (16.8%) COUNTRY 13.8% (14.2%) HARD MUSIC 10.2% (10.1%) RAP 8.7% (7.8%) SOUNDTRACK 4.0% (4.0%) LATIN 2.9% (3.1%) ELECTRONIC 3.0% (2.8%) CLASSICAL 2.8% (2.4%) JAZZ 2.3% (2.6%)
The above shows share of 2013 US albums market by genre with 2012 figures in brackets.
source: Nielsen SoundScan
sold counted as an album and here sales dropped year-on-year by 7.7% to 415.3 million units, compared to a far lighter fall of 1.8% in 2012. Where the decline may have steadied is in the
CD market with sales down by around 14.5% in 2013 to 165.4 million units compared to a 13.5% fall in 2012. Even in the US the format continued to make up the majority of album numbers last year, commanding a 57.2% share with digital accounting for 40.6% and vinyl around 2% with 12-inch album sales up 33% to another record high in the SoundScan era dating back to 1991.
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