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One Direction may have scored the biggest selling album of 2013 with their release, Midnight Memories, but the boyband did so withe lowest selling album in over 20 years, shifting less than a million copies.
While the album impressively sold almost 700,000 sales in just five weeks to rush ahead of Emeli Sande's record-breaking debut album, Our Version Of Events (which sold 683,000 copies in 2013 and more than 2.07 million copies to date), it is the lowest end-of-year album sales topper in terms of units shifted for over two decades.
Sande's debut shifted 1.3million copies to claim the top spot in 2012 - in a year when the top four best-selling LPs all sold more than Midnight Memories.
It is reported that in 2011, the whole top 10 outsold Midnight Memories. Impressively, 21 by Adele came in at No.1 with 3.8 million while 2010 saw Take That's Progress take top-ranking with 1.8 million.
UK retailers have commented on the decline in album and single sales in 2013, blaming a lacklustre catalogue of albums on offer to the consumer. 2013 was a bad year for album sales with a decline seen across the board with a 6.4 per cent drop in album sales and a 3.4 per cent slump in single sales. This was all despite offerings from some of the biggest bands in the industry including Beyonce, Arctic Monkeys, Katy Perry and David Bowie.
In their round up of the year in Music Week, ERA who represent HMV, Spotify, Deezer, O2 Tracks, Rough Trade, Tesco, Amazon and Bloom.fm, have chosen to blame the strength of what was on offer.
"Music’s performance is primarily due to a weak release schedule," writes general manager Kym Bayley. "Which is particularly disappointing given the huge investment by digital services in music’s future. Retailers will be hoping that labels deliver bigger hits in 2014."
Below: Our top 50 albums of 2013
