What a week for EMI.
As well as winning the Record Company trophy at the Music Week Awards, the Universal Music UK label has the biggest weekly album sale of 2023 so far with Lewis Capaldi’s Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent.
Powered by strong physical pre-orders – the album was announced back in October – as well as heavy streaming consumption, Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent opens at the summit with sales of 95,882 (Official Charts Company). It actually hit the biggest weekly sale of the year so far after just five days.
The Scottish singer-songwriter’s second album has already provided three No.1 singles – Forget Me, Pointless and Wish You The Best.
Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent’s first week consumption of 95,882 units is the highest weekly total for any album so far in 2023, and since Taylor Swift’s Midnights in October last year.
Lewis Capaldi’s opening sale for his sophomore release is 7.12% above the first week tally of 89,506 that debut LP Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent achieved in 2019.
Ed Sheeran’s – (Subtract) was the previous fastest-selling album of 2023, opening with 76,263 sales earlier this month. Capaldi’s album actually features a Sheeran co-write (Pointless).
Easily outselling the rest of the Top 10 combined, Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent moved 58,421 CDs, 18,308 vinyl albums, 2,418 cassettes and 4,834 digital downloads, as well as amassing 11,901 sales-equivalent streams. The 26-year-old Glaswegian co-wrote every track on the album.
As revealed in our charts analysis by Alan Jones this week, Broken By Desire… has the highest weekly sale by a Scottish act since Paolo Nutini’s Caustic Love topped the chart in April 2014, on first week sales of 109,011.
Broken By Desire… is also No.1 on the vinyl chart, and it was the most streamed album of the week.
Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent, a Top 20 regular, was steady at No.17 (4,598 sales) on the chart. It has sales to date of 1,516,892.
In the singles chart, Capaldi’s former No.1 Wish You The Best climbed 5-3 (30,026 sales), while Haven’t You Ever Been In Love Before? debuted at No.28 (13,063).
Read our Music Week cover story with Lewis Capaldi here.
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