Brits Take Top Ten Albums

The Official Charts Company has revealed that for the first time ever, British artists claimed the entirety of the Top Ten selling albums in the UK last year.

To the surprise of precisely no-one, the biggest selling album of the year was Ed Sheeran’s second album ‘x’, which has sold 1.7m (1,689,124) copies in the UK since its release in June last year and spent 14 weeks at the top of the album chart. In a mind boggling twist, almost half a million of these sales came in the final two weeks of the chart year as the British public seemingly set out to persecute family members and secret Santa recipients alike.

Sam Smith’s ‘In The Lonely Hour’ is at Number with UK sales of over 1m (1,248,000), joining Sheeran as the only two artists to have sold over a million albums in the UK last year. Sheeran’s sales are now higher than any entry in the top ten albums since Adele’s ‘21’ in 2011.

On the streaming front, Sheeran’s ‘x’ was also Spotify’s most streamed album of the year, joining One Direction, Coldplay and Calvin Harris as one of only four artists to exceed a billion streams on the platform. This also represents ten years in a row that the bestselling artist album has come from a British act. The top five also comprises albums from George Ezra, Paulo Nutini and Coldplay. One Direction, Paloma Faith, Olly Murs, Take That and Pink Floyd make up the rest of the top ten, which you can see all in order here.