Global Top Sellers Of 2013

The latest IFPI report is out outlining the recording industry's health for 2013. We'll cover the numbers more in depth in a future post, but first let's look at the top global sellers of last year.

Global Top Selling Albums of 2013

	ARTIST	TITLE	TOTAL SALES (M)
1	One Direction	Midnight Memories	4.0
2	Eminem	The Marshall Mathers LP2	3.8
3	Justin Timberlake	The 20/20 Experience	3.6
4	Bruno Mars	Unorthodox Jukebox	3.2
5	Daft Punk	Random Access Memories	3.2
6	Katy Perry	Prism	2.8
7	Michael Bublé	To Be Loved	2.4
8	Imagine Dragons	Night Visions	2.4
9	Lady Gaga	Artpop	2.3
10	Beyoncé	Beyoncé	2.3

Global Top Selling Digital Singles of 2013

	ARTIST	TITLE	TOTAL SALES (M)
1	Robin Thicke	Blurred Lines	14.8
2	Macklemore & Ryan Lewis	Thrift Shop	13.4
3	Avicii	Wake Me Up	11.1
4	P!nk feat. Nate Ruess	Just Give Me A Reason	9.9
5	Katy Perry	Roar	9.9
6	Daft Punk	Get Lucky	9.3
7	Imagine Dragons	Radioactive	8.6
8	Bruno Mars	When I Was Your Man	8.3
9	will.I.Am	Scream & Shout	8.1
10	Rihanna	Stay	7.9

One of the things that sticks out is that the sales numbers for these hits are rather anemic when you consider we're talking world-wide. Also, when you consider the amount of hype that artists like Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce and Daft Punk received, you'd expect the numbers to be much higher.

But that's the music business we live in today, where sales numbers aren't what they once were and probably never will be. That said, I bet if you look at the same artist's YouTube and streaming numbers (which I'll attempt to get), they'd be off the charts.

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A Look At Music Sales So Far

At the half-way point in the year, we can look at music sales and wonder where everything is going again. Here are the facts:

• Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience is the years biggest seller, with just over 2 million sales.

• No other album sold more than a million, with Bruno Mars Unorthodox Jukebox at 985,000, Mumford & Sons Babel at 600,000 and Blake Shelton's Based On A True Story at 703,000

• Album sales are down by 5.6% over last year.

This just goes to show that we really do live in a single's world. When the business was at its peak, these would've been poor sales for a week, let alone 6 months. On the singles side:

• Macklemore and Ryan Lewis sold 5.56 million dowloads of "Thrift Shop," which is the fastest selling song for the first 6 months of any calendar year.

• Pink's "Just Give Me A Reason" was second with 3.5 million, Bruno Mars "When I Was Your Man" with 3.4 million, and Rihanna's "Stay" with 3.3 million followed.

• Digital singles are down by 2.3% from last year.

Obviously some big releases by Jay-Z and Kanye West don't figure into the numbers here, so by the end of the year the overall sales performance can look completely different, but so far, sales aren't setting the world on fire.

Could it be the fact that more people are streaming instead of buying? Perhaps the music isn't compelling enough? What do you think?

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Top Selling Albums Of The 2000's

Here we are at the end of the decade and it's a good time to take a look at just who sold what during the transition from Music 2.5 to Music 3.0.

Believe it or not, The Beatles had the top-selling album of the 2000's with their greatest hits package "1." The album had sales of over 11,448,000 copies since its release in November 2000, according to Nielsen SoundScan’s decade-end sales numbers. The Fab Four sold a combined 30 million units during the decade.

But rapper Eminem was the 2000s’ top-selling artist with 32.2 million combined in sales, with two albums in the decade’s Top 10 - The Marshall Mathers LP selling 10,195,000 and Eminem Show right behind it at 9,789,000.

It used to be that a real bona fide hit was pretty much guaranteed to sell diamond (10 million sales), but only ‘NSync’s No Strings Attached (11,111,000) and Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me (10,523,000) managed to hit those numbers along with The Beatles and Eminem.

But what really showed the decline in CD sales was that only two albums released in the years between 2005 and 2009 managed to get in the Top 20 of the 2000s’ bestsellers - Nickelback’s All the Right Reasons and Carrie Underwood’s Some Hearts at 14 and 17 with sales under seven million.

Flo Rida’s Low was the 2000s biggest-selling digital single, while Coldplay’s Viva La Vida was the best-selling digital album.

Wonder what the numbers will look like at the end of the next decade?

Bestselling Albums of the Decade
1. The Beatles - 1 - 11,499,000
2. *NSYNC - No Strings Attached - 11,112,000
3. Norah Jones - Come Away With Me - 10,546,000
4. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP - 10,204,000
5. Eminem - The Eminem Show - 9,799,000
6. Usher - Confessions - 9,712,000
7. Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory - 9,663,000
8. Creed - Human Clay - 9,491,000
9. Britney Spears - Oops! ... I Did It Again - 9,185,000
10. Nelly - Country Grammar - 8,461,000

Bestselling Digital Singles of the Decade
1. Flo Rida feat. T-Pain - "Low" - 5,214,000
2. Lady Gaga feat. Colby O'Donis - "Just Dance" - 4,690,000
3. Jason Mraz - "I'm Yours" - 4,619,000
4. Timbaland feat. OneRepublic - "Apologize" - 4,439,000
5. The Black Eyed Peas - "Boom Boom Pow" - 4,349,000
6. Soulja Boy Tell'em - "Crank That" - 4,315,000
7. Lady Gaga - "Poker Face" - 4,200,000
8. Coldplay - "Viva la Vida" - 4,140,000
9. Taylor Swift - "Love Story" - 4,005,000
10. Katy Perry - "Hot N Cold" - 3,945,000