Last week’s total figure of 4.25m is the lowest recorded by Nielsen since it began collecting data in 1991, beating the previous all-time low of 4.49m which occurred in October last year.
The soundtrack for Disney’s new film Frozen was the biggest selling record of the week – achieving that dubious distinction after shifting just 86,000 copies.
As a comparison, Nielsen points out that the record week for sales in the US since the early Nineties happened in the December of 2000, when a cool 45.4 million albums flew off the shelves in a week. That year, over 785m LPs were sold in the States, again way ahead of the confirmed total for 2013, which was set at around 289m.
The UK is suffering a similar slump on the album format, with sales dropping to the tune of 6.4% year-on-year in 2013. There was better news for vinyl however, with initiatives such as Record Store Day helping sales on that format surge by 101%.
