CHARTS 2008: DUFFY'S ROCKFERRY SAILS TO VICTORY.

Duffy's debut Rockferry carried all before it in 2008 as albums sales experienced a slight dip on the previous year but largely held up well to defy illegal downloads and downturns in the economy

By Alan Jones

In freefall elsewhere, particularly in the US, album sales in the UK survived the twin threat of recession and illegal downloading pretty well in 2008, with the final OCC tally of 133,643,773 sales representing a decline of just 3.2% over 2007's 138,067,371 - and in the final quarter sales actually increased year-on-year by 0.9%. Artist albums declined 4.5%, more than three times the 1.4% dip in the compilations sector, but don't blame Duffy - the rookie who started the year as runner-up to Adele in the BBC's Sound Of 2008 poll ended up trouncing all opposition, to sell 1,684,944 copies of debut set Rockferry and takes the big one home to Wales for the first time since 1968, when Tom Jones's Live At The Talk Of Town emerged as the best- selling artist album.

It is the first time at the top of the annual rankings for Duffy, and the first time her label, A&M, has occupied pole position on the list since 1980, four years before her birth. At the time it was a standalone independent, and earned its victory via The Police's Zenyatta Mondatta. Nowadays, A&M is an imprint of Universal, which completes a notable hat-trick, having topped the list in 2007 with Amy Winehouse's Back To Black, and in 2006 with Snow Patrol's Eyes Open. Rockferry was far and away the biggest-selling 2008 debut album, ahead of Dublin band The Script's self-titled set (544,028 sales) and the aforementioned Adele's 19 (479,328).

Duffy beat off a formidable late challenge from the comeback kings Take That, who sold 1,446,135 copies of The Circus in the last four weeks of the year. It became the second-fastest million-seller to date and the first album to sell more than 300,000 copies for four weeks in a row. Take That's back catalogue sold a further 600,000 copies, with the resultant tally of 2,051,285 sales in the year earning the group the title of the year's best-selling act. They were the third-placed act in 2007, and second in 2006. All artist sales data, incidentally, is based on the top 10,000 albums, with a cut-off point of albums selling fewer than 690 copies.

Kings Of Leon occupy third place in both the top albums list and the top artists list. The Nashville quartet's latest album, Only By The Night, spun off major hits in Sex On Fire and Use Somebody, and contributed the lion's share (1,181,640) of the group's 1,620,215 sales in 2008. Britain really feels the love for Kings Of Leon, who are much less well-known in the US, where the album has sold only 255,416 copies.

Six acts sold more than a million albums in 2008, compared to five in 2007, but 11 achieved the feat in 2006. Amy Winehouse nearly did it for the second year in a row, with sales of 999,012 in 2008, and Leona Lewis did do it, with her debut album Spirit chalking up a seven-figure sale, just as it did in ...