Now That's What I Call Music! still has it

Tuesday March 25, 2008

Arguably the strongest album in the series, which celebrates its 25th birthday later this year, Now! 69 features half of this week’s Top 10, 17 hits currently in the Top 40, and the last four number ones.

It explodes out of the box, with first-week sales of 382,759, beating the previous highest weekly sale for a Now! album – the 334,345 start made by Now! 57 in April 2004 by a huge 14.48% margin. Now! 69 was undoubtedly helped to its huge total by the fact it is the first Now! album to break the £10 retail barrier, with its price falling as low as £9.87 in fierce competition. It outsold the number two compilation – the Ashes To Ashes TV soundtrack (27,544 sales) – by a margin of nearly 14 to one, and sold more copies than the rest of the Top 200 compilations combined, a remarkable, unprecedented feat.

Along with Easter gift-buying, it helped boost album sales week-on-week by 34.7% to 2,701,134 – that’s their third highest level of the year. It was 27.9% up on the 2,111,718 albums sold in the same week last year, which was a regular week, and, perhaps more impressively, 3.12% up on the 2,619,340 albums sold in Easter week last year, when it fell a fortnight later (April 8).

Aside from Now! 69, the albums market doubtless benefited from an excellent slew on new artist releases, with seven selling well enough to debut inside the Top 20. Those by Elbow, Bryan Adams, Mike Oldfield and Van Morrison are featured on this page, and there were also Top 20 debut for Muse, We Are Scientists and Taio Cruz.

After consecutive number one albums with 2003’s Absolution and 2006’s Black Holes & Revelations, Muse debut at number two with their live set HAARP, which sold 45,276 copies last week. Absolution is the band’s biggest selling CD but will be overtaken this week by Black Holes & Revelations, which has thus far sold 710,072 copies.

A fortnight after introductory single After Hours gave Californian indie rockers We Are Scientists their highest charting hit to date – reaching number 15 – their second album Brain Thrust Mastery debuts at number 11 on sales of 14,723. Their 2005 debut, With Love & Squalor, peaked lower, at number 43, but has sold 144,626 copies to date. Containing his 2006 debut hit I Just Wanna Know, 2007 follow-up Moving On and current success Come On Girl, Taio Cruz’s debut album Departure enters at number 17 on sales of 11,880.

The 29th album issued on the Lex label since it was set up in 2001, Neon Neon’s Stainless Style is the first to chart. Debuting at number 67 on sales of 3,289, it is a collaboration between Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys and American producer Bryan Hollon, who releases albums on Lex as Boom Bip. Finally, the Eagles are in residency at the O2, and to mark the event their 2003 compilation The Complete Greatest Hits is being repromoted. It returns to the chart at number 26 on sales of 8,224, topping its original number 27 peak, but not the number nine slot in gained when re-promoted in 2006. The album has sold 317,440 copies to date.