Amy Winehouse first album to sell 100,000 downloads

Posted March 7, 200817 yr

Thursday March 6, 2008

By Alan Jones

Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black album was in the news again at the weekend, as it returned to the top of the album chart after an absence of a year but arguably its biggest achievement last week was to become the first digital album to ‘go gold’ in the UK, passing 100,000 sales on download.

Legal downloads dominate the singles market, where they accounted for 94% of all sales last week, with physical formats barely afloat on 6% but those percentages are almost exactly reversed in the album market.

Downloading albums is still in its infancy, with most consumers still preferring to own the physical product – CDs, vinyl and cassette commanded a combined 94.9% of the album market last week, leaving digital with a 5.1% share. Even so, that’s 139,940 albums sold in digital form, up from 78,838 (3.1%) in the same week in 2007.

There are still massive variations in digital penetration among popular albums – The Beatles’ back catalogue is famously not downloadable and 13 of the Top 200 artist albums last week were also available only in physical form. At the opposite end of the scale, Daft Punk’s new concert set Alive achieved the highest penetration in digital form, with downloads accounting for a hefty 42% of its first week sales (1,175 out of 2,850) – possibly because it is one of the few albums available at this stage available in unprotected iTunes Plus AAC format with a bit rate of 256, compared to iTunes’ regular downloads, which are protected with a bit rate of 128 kbps.

The 10 biggest selling downloads, up to close of business last Saturday (1 March) are as follows:

title – ARTIST – DOWNLOAD SALES – TOTAL SALES – DOWNLOAD AS %AGE OF TOTAL

BACK TO BLACK – Amy Winehouse - 101,423-2,431,231-4.17%

EYES OPEN – Snow Patrol - 77,267-2,095,586-3.69%

LIFE IN CARTOON MOTION – Mika - 57,330-1,358,913-4.22%

BEAUTIFUL WORLD – Take That - 52,018-2,363,486-2.20%

UNDISCOVERED – James Blunt – 49,208-1,283,644-3.11%

RAZORLIGHT – Razorlight – 45,987-1,413,449-3.25%

VERSION – Mark Ronson – 45,452-672,543-6.76%

FAVOURITE WORST NIGHTMARE – Arctic Monkeys – 43,162-655,695-6.58%

SAM’S TOWN – The Killers – 41.785-1,224,152-3.41%

HAND BUILT BY ROBOTS – Newton Faulkner – 39,979-563,054-7.10%

Among multi-artist compilations, the top downloads are High School Musical (18,364-992,480-1.85%) followed fairly distantly by The Ministry Of Sound’s The Annual 2007 (10,677-278,960-3.83%).