Good songs + primetime TV exposure = big sales.

This week's big hits are an example of how sensible A&R and some mainstream TV exposure gets results

Bill Shankly once famously observed that football was a simple game complicated by fools. Sometimes you wonder whether he could equally have been talking about the music industry. At a time when artist album sales are 13.5% down on the year to date and the now month-old fourth quarter shows no sign of turning those depressing numbers around, some much-needed positive sales news finally arrived last week in the shape of the new singles from Leona Lewis and Take That.

In just two days, Lewis's second single Bleeding Love had achieved what only one other single - The Proclaimers' Comic Relief offering - had previously managed across an entire week this year by smashing through 100,000 sales, while in almost any other week this year Take That's huge sales for new single Rule The World would have been enough to make it the nation's number one by a country mile.

So what are the complicated ingredients that have enabled these two tracks to defy the usual sales trends of a singles market where number ones on average this year have sold little more than 40,000 units each week? Whisper this radical formula quietly, but both are great pop records that landed primetime terrestrial TV exposure in the immediate run-up to their respective releases - factors that used to be something of the norm but have become a rarity these days as the industry focus on pop has waned and there is no weekly high-profile music programming on any of the five terrestrial TV networks.

In these pages last week X Factor judge Louis Walsh, whose programme made Lewis a star in the first place and then gave her a slot on which to perform the new single a weekend ago, ...