Album sales up for the firsttime in 6 years

Fri 8th Jul, 2011 in International News

Label execs (and Adele ) will be rolling in mountains of money and partying hard after it was announced that, for the first time in six years, album sales have grown. That’s right total album sales are up by a whooping 1% in the first half of 2011 compared to the the same period last year.

The latest sales figures come from the new Nielsen SoundScan report which reports that total album sales (including CDs, digital albums, LPs and more) music sales are up 8.5% however, it’s older albums that are leading the ‘resurgence’. A 7% growth in catalogue album sales cancels out a 4% drop in more recent albums. Vinyl has some new converts with sales growing by 41% since last year, but digital music still leads, making up a third of all albums sold.

Adele leads three sales categories – top selling physical album and digital album with 21, and top digital track with Rolling in the Deep. Next week, 21 is expected to surpass Eminem’s 2010 album Recovery as the biggest selling digital title in history. Just this week, Recovery became the first album to exceed 1 million paid digital sales. Katy Perry’s ET featuring Kanye West dominates as top selling digital song (a category that combines all versions of the song), with just more than 4.1 million sales, narrowly beating Adele.

For whatever genre names are worth, Rock music leads with sales of 52.3 million (an increase of 2% on last year), followed by Alternative, R&B and Rap. Classical and Electronic have had the largest gains growing by 13% and 9% respectively in 2011.