ARIA’s Charts Manager tracks the sales year just past

ARIA Charts Manager Ian Wallace chats to TMN about sales trends and anomalies in 2013.

You’ve obviously studied the charts for many years, what trends did you notice in 2013?

We had a record number of Australian #1 Albums in 2013 with 14, as no album was able to establish total dominance of the charts as Adele was able to do a year or so ago. There were also a record 34 different #1 albums during the calendar year.

How long has the idea of the streaming chart been around? How hard was it to pull together?

ARIA began planning a Streaming Chart as soon as the first streaming services emerged a couple of years ago. Once they began entering

the Australian market, we ramped up these conversations and began collecting and testing their data. We were able to launch the first Streaming Chart in late 2012, initially with three services on board. That number is now six and includes Deezer, JB Hi-Fi Now, Rdio, Samsung, Songl and Spotify.

I know you can’t talk specific sales amounts, but what was the closest week in regards to #1 and #2 on either the Albums and Singles chart?

There were several occasions on both of the Singles and Albums Charts where the difference between the top two titles was within a few percentage points, but the closest result came on the Singles chart of 29 April when Passenger’s Let Her Go prevailed over Daft Punk’s Get Lucky by just 0.3%.

Conversely, the biggest margin of 2013 occurred on the Albums Chart of 27 May, when Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories outsold its nearest competitors by a ratio of more than 7:1. Honorable mention should also go to Katy Perry whose album Prism outsold competitors by 6:1 in the first week of November.

2013 didn’t throw up any real surprising spikes outside of the fourth quarter, but the best weeks occurred in May around the time of the Daft Punk release.

Interviews with, and insights from, numerous key industry figures such as Wallace are featured in the Australian Music Industry Quarterly – out now. To get a copy sent to you for under $10, click here.