New Year brings good sales news.(The Market)

After spectacular pre-Christmas trading, which saw a record 10,581,571 albums sold in the week ending on Christmas Eve--beating the previous best ever sales tally of 10,298,132 set in the same week in 2000--sales were naturally more subdued last week, with album units down 61.95% at 4,026,048.

But this was still a good effort, providing the sixth biggest week of 2005, despite bad weather and the fact that very few shops were open on Christmas Day, when just 1,665 of those sales were recorded.

With albums in the Christmas artist albums Top 10 registering the biggest declines last week--between 79.3% (James Blunt) and 91.4% (Il Divo)--Eminem's Curtain Call: The Hits retains pole position despite sales which would have earned it only 30th place in the artist albums chart the previous week.

In Christmas week, artist album sector sales tallied 8,572,001, with the top five albums all clearing the 200,000 sales mark, while the top 16 sold more than 100,000 and 98 exceeded 10,000 sales. Last week, with artist album sales at 3,309,626--down 61.39%--Curtain Call topped the list with 58,369 sales, and the number selling more than 10,000 copies was down to 47.

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