Johnny Borrell has failed to make the Top 100 on the UK Album Chart this week after reportedly only shifting 594 copies of his debut solo LP ‘Borrell 1‘.
Borrell announced his first solo effort in June after laying Razorlight to rest for the foreseeable future but, like many current guitar-led acts, he has found it a struggle to make any sort of impact on the mainstream chart.
The general decline in sales for studio albums has been further reflected with the news that this week’s number one – a collection of covers from X Factor wannabe Jahmene Douglas – reached the summit after clearing just 19,000 copies.
By contrast, the overall biggest seller of the past seven days was by some distance the latest edition of the ‘Now That’s What I Call Music!‘ series, which has become the fastest seller of 2013 so far with sales of 317,000. Its immediate predecessor, ‘Now That’s What I Call Music! 84‘, is already the biggest selling album of the year in the UK to-date.
UPDATE:
Stiff Records released this LOL press release looking at the bright side of the album’s first week of dismal sales.
Stiff Records is proud to announce first week sales figures for its latest album – Johnny Borrell’s ‘Borrell 1’ – of 594.
‘Borrell 1′ is the début solo LP from the former Razorlight vocalist and is the first new album on the highly prolific Stiff Records since 2007.
That last album was the multi million-selling two-volume set, ’30 Years Of Stiff Records’ (although admittedly that was a free cover-mount with ‘The Independent on Sunday’).
“First week sales of 594 makes ‘Borrell 1′ the 15,678th best selling album of the year to date,” comments a Stiff spokesperson. “So far we’ve achieved 0.00015% sales of Adele’s ’21’ – and 0.03% sales of this week’s No. 1 album from Jahmene Douglas – so we feel like it’s all to play for as we move into the all-important week two.”
“We might even break the Top 100.”