High Flying Vinyl Charts

The Official Charts Company has dropped the needle on the main beneficiary of the recent vinyl boom and, far from fulfilling any sort of heritage act dad rock clichés it is…Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.

Gallagher’s LP ‘Chasing Yesterday’ was the highest selling vinyl album release in the first six months of this year, followed closely by Led Zeppelin’s ‘Physical Graffiti’ and the Stone Roses’ debut album in second and third position respectively. Blur, Pink Floyd and Arctic Monkeys also pop up in the top ten alongside relative newcomers Royal Blood and Sufjan Stevens, who is the biggest selling international act.

Astonishingly, Gallagher also claimed all top three of the vinyl singles chart, with the remainder of the top ten made up of releases by Blur, David Bowie, Mark Ronson and Paul Weller.

As this Guardian piece points out, female artists don’t exactly feature highly in either chart, with the highest charting album at number 18, Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back in Black’.

As reported, the first quarter of 2015 saw vinyl album sales up 69 per cent and vinyl single sales up by 23%, though it remains relatively niche, representing approximately 2% of the market. Despite this, overall demand for vinyl has risen by over 55% in 2015 and the format is on track to hit 2m sales within the year.

See the complete list over at the OCC.

Elsewhere, according to a BPI report based on Official Charts Company data as reported in Music Week, recorded music consumption rose in the UK in the first six months of 2015, driven by a continued rise in streaming and a slower decline in physical formats.

The biggest selling albums in the first six months of the year in the UK were ‘In The Lonely Hour’ by Sam Smith followed by Ed Sheeran’s x and George Ezra’s Wanted On Voyage.

The total number of tracks streamed in the first half of 2015 is 11.5bn, in comparison to 14.8bn in the entirety of 2014. The most-streamed track of the year to date is Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk, which has been played 45 million times on streaming services in 2015 and is also the best selling song of 2015 so far, reaching 1.93m sales, 1.44m of which were in this year.

Overall album sales in the US fell by 4% last year in the first six months of the year, from 120.9m to 115.1m

In addition, Music Business Worldwide reports that digital album sales are now declining faster than cd sales in the UK.