Music Retail Makes A Stand Against Economic ills

Music retail is making a defiant stand against the economic turmoil with first-week sales of the new Oasis album continuing the momentum of a hugely-encouraging start to quarter four.

The band’s Big Brother/Sony BMG album Dig Out Your Soul opened with one of the biggest first-day sales of the year, shifting nearly 90,000 units, and finished with a total of 200,866 units to debut yesterday (Sunday) at number one.

Its success swiftly follows the Kings of Leon album Only By The Night, released by Hand Me Down/ Columbia, opening with 220,879 sales two weeks ago and needing little more than a fortnight to accelerate into the Top 10 biggest sellers of the year. “What the Kings of Leon and Oasis albums show is that if you make a great record, there’s plenty of people out there who will want to buy music and if there are any casualties in Q4 the records aren’t quite good enough,” says Sony BMG chairman and CEO Ged Doherty.

Big Brother general manager Emma Greengrass says sales of the new Oasis album have so far exceeded expectations with an opening-week figure of 180,000 sales originally projected.

“We’ve had a good build-up in the summer with the remix at clubs and the single has done well at radio,” she says. “We had some disappointment with promo because of Noel’s accident in Canada, but it doesn’t seem to have affected things for us.”

“The Oasis start is phenomenal,” adds Doherty. “Big Brother has done a tremendous job and the sales are up on the last Oasis album.”

Source: www.musicweek.com

A list of the fastest selling albums in the UK, can be found here.