Festive joy masks high-street peril; huge sales in the run-up to Christmas were welcomed, but casualties could still emerge.(Editorial)

A few weeks ago, with a matter of days to go before Christmas Day, the upbeat, end-of-term optimism remained in the shadow of continuing concern over the festive market.

With less than a week to Christmas, many in the business of selling records were getting twitchy. Despite many predictions that it would be a late, late Christmas, a sneaking suspicion remained--that the customers might not actually turn up at all. But turn up they did, and in huge numbers.

There are many remarkable things about the final week of trading leading into the Christmas weekend. The massive uplift week-on-week--almost 40%--was staggering, as was the massive reaction to Shayne Ward's X-Factor single.

Even accounting for an extra day, compared with 2004, the Christmas-week sales of the UK's very biggest albums were striking too. Eminem's number-one album in Christmas week sold 46% more copies than the number one in the same week last year, while runners-up outperformed the albums in 2004's equivalent positions, namely those by James Blunt (up 30%), Robbie Williams (43%), Westlife (56%) and Take That (50%).

And, however late it falls, ...