A week ago, the prospect of physical album sales dipping below 10% of the market during the Covid-19 lockdown was a real possibility.
But that’s been held off – for now at least – by unlikely chart star Gerry Cinnamon. The media-shy Scottish singer-songwriter landed his first No.1 with sophomore album The Bonny (Little Runaway/AWAL), which delivered 28,945 sales (6,629 from streams), according to the Official Charts Company.
Proper Music handled the physical distribution and scored their first No.1 album for the company’s sales team.
Of course, a big chunk of that physical sale will come from the Music Glue D2C operation, a key part of the AWAL campaign according to GM Paul Trueman. But there were also sales from supermarkets, indie retail and Amazon in the mix.
Cinnamon’s performance means that physical sales accounted for 13.4% of the albums market for the chart week ending April 23. A week earlier, physical was down to 10.6%, following consecutive weekly falls in share for physical. Before the lockdown, CDs, vinyl and cassettes were still pulling in a 19.4% weekly share of sales.
Enter Shikari also provided a retail boost with 8,385 week one physical sales for Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible (So Recordings). At No.3, Dua Lipa added 1,799 physical copies of Future Nostalgia (Warner Records), although the vast majority of its ‘sales’ were from streams.
Overall, physical artist album sales were up 31.7% week-on-week to 197,949 units. Album streams (SEA-2) dipped 1.5%, but overall artist albums (AES) were still up 1.8% week-on-week (1,678,455 units).
That 31.7% represented 47,669 units, so Cinnamon’s physical sales amounted to 46.8% of the weekly growth in artist album sales – quite an achievement for independent artist whose career was initially focused on Scotland.
All album sales were up 18.9% week-on-week, though a 1.4% decline in album streams (SEA-2) – now 80.4% of the albums market – resulted in an overall increase of 2% in the all albums AES metric (1,771,364).
Overall, audio streams were down 1.1% week-on-week at 2,282,656,618.
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