Charts analysis: The Lottery Winners triumph in another albums chart contest

The Lottery Winners hit the jackpot for the second time, with KOKO debuting at No.1 on consumption of 23,420 units (15,077 CDs, 4,469 vinyl albums, 482 cassettes, 2,941 digital downloads and 451 sales-equivalent streams). Thus emulating their last album, Anxiety Replacement Therapy – which also debuted at No.1, in May 2023, on consumption of 22,209 units – KOKO is the Leigh indie quartet’s fifth album in exactly five years and is a triumph of marketing with its 27 physical variants (16 CD, six vinyl and five cassette) surpassing the 23 of its predecessor. Comprising 35-year-old lead singer/guitarist Thom Rylance – who wrote nine of the 12 tracks on KOKO alone, the remainder with outside help – 36-year-old guitarist Rob Lally, 32-year-old bassist Katie Lloyd and 31-year-old drummer Joe Singleton, The Lottery Winners have been together since 2008, and hadn’t made the Top 10 before Anxiety Replacement Therapy, which has to-date sales of 30,488 units. Their eponymous March 2020 debut reached No.23 and has sold 7,818 copies; August 2020 covers set Sounds Of Isolation reached No.61 and has sold 2,947 copies; and December 2021 release Something To Leave The House For reached No.11 and has sold 13,334 copies. KOKO, incidentally, is an acronym for its closing track – Keep On Keeping On – and includes collaborations with Frank Turner (who also guested on their last album), Reverend & The Makers, Chad Kroeger and Shed Seven. Their 11th studio album in a chart career spanning nearly 38 years, The Great Western Road debuts at No.3, (11,126 sales) to become Deacon Blue’s highest-charting album of new material since third album, Fellow Hoodlums, reached No.2 in 1991. Formed in Glasgow 40 years ago, the veteran pop/rock band first charted in May 1987, reaching No.14 with debut set, Raintown, and topped the chart with 1989 follow-up, When The World Knows Your Name and 1994 compilation, Our Town: The Greatest Hits. The Great Western Road is the seventh Top 10 and 16th Top 75 album for the band, who are still fronted by 67-year-old singer/guitarist Ricky Ross, and feature fellow original members 60-year-old singer Lorraine McIntosh (Ricky’s wife), 64-year-old keyboards player James Prime and 58-year-old drummer Dougie Vipond. I Said I Love You First is the first collaborative album between Selena Gomez and her fiancée, Benny Blanco. Debuting at No.4 (9,216 sales), it is Gomez’s ninth Top 75 and second Top 10 album. It is Blanco’s first Top 75 entry, although he reached No.144 with 2018 album, Friends Keep Secrets, and No.173 with the separately logged 2021 expansion of that set, Friends Keep Secrets 2, with the former recording consumption of 41,370 units, the latter 60,303 units, having gone silver only last week. In the top five continuously since its debut 31 weeks ago, Short N’ Sweet is in its favourite No.2 berth for the 19th time in total and third time in a row (16,060 sales) for Sabrina Carpenter. The rest of the Top 10: Mayhem (4-5, 8,822 sales) by Lady Gaga, +-=÷× Tour Collection (6-6, 7,716 sales) by Ed Sheeran, Music (1-7, 7,552 sales) by Playboi Carti, So Close To What (5-8, 7,254 sales) by Tate McRae, 50 Years: Don’t Stop (9-9, 6,913 sales) by Fleetwood Mac and The Highlights (10-10, 6,283 sales) by The Weeknd. Exiting the Top 10: The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess (7-11, 6,165 sales) by Chappell Roan, People Watching (8-12, 5,885 sales) by Sam Fender and, fast-tracking its way out of the Top 200, last week’s No.3, The Overview (1,150 sales) by Steven Wilson. Essex indie band The Horrors’ first album in eight years, and sixth in total, Night Life ends their run of three consecutive Top 10 entries, debuting at No.16 (5,431 sales). The band celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Their most successful album, Skying, peaked at No.5 in 2011 and has to-date consumption of 74,021 units. Together again, and set to tour later this year with Busted, McFly’s televised anniversary gig, 21 Live was also released as an album, and debuts at No.71 (2,315 sales), becoming their 10th charted set. 2017 soundtrack The Greatest Showman is No.1 (3,067 sales) on the compilation chart for the second week in a row and 56th time in all since it was excommunicated from the artist album chart at the start of 2020 following a change in chart regulations. It previously topped the artist chart on 28 occasions. In the 381 weeks since it was released, The Greatest Showman is by far the most-consumed title, with a to-date tally of 2,908,514 units in that time, nearly a million more than nearest rival, Divide (1,932,088) by Ed Sheeran, with Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent (1,777,584 units) by Lewis Capaldi a distant third. Consumption of The Greatest Showman is now largely in the form of streaming but its to-date pure sales/streaming consumption tallies are almost even with 1,458,488 units in the former metric and 1,450,026 in the latter. Overall album sales are up 1.78% week-on-week at 2,546,811 units, 5.22% above same week 2024 sales of 2,420,384. Physical product accounts for 289,404 sales, 11.36% of the total. PHOTO: Shaolin Pete

Centre Stage: Mark Davyd on how we must act to better serve music fans

The UK benefits from one of the most intensely represented and well-structured music ecosystems anywhere in the world. Wherever you find yourself in the rich tapestry of our cultural landscape, there is a body that represents your interests – from UK Music and LIVE at the top, and the umbrella organisations representing the collective interests of recorded, publishing and live sectors, through to artist representative bodies, musicians’ collectives, performing rights societies, managers, promoters, festivals, major labels, independent labels, and much more. Indeed, almost everyone creating, producing, presenting or actively involved in the British music industry can turn to someone and join part of a collective representative group. You can trust me on this. However, that doesn’t include the fans. The people who we need most of all, the people who ultimately consume everything we create, don’t have a representative voice. The fan-led review of English football in 2021 was initiated as a result of ‘three points of crisis’ in the national game: the collapse of Bury FC; the Covid-19 pandemic; and the attempt to form the European Super League. These three events had a significant impact on the English football pyramid. They led to protests from fans, media, pundits as well as commentators, and that noise eventually persuaded politicians that something was wrong with the way football was being managed. Our national sport had governance structures in place, including multiple representative bodies touching on every aspect of it, but the fans had lost faith in the ability of those bodies to deal with the issues they believed faced the game they love. As a result, the Secretary Of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport announced the proposal for the Fan-Led Review Of Football Governance. There are a lot of assumptions in the music industry about what fans think. On the live side, for the most part, we work under the assumption that if we sell the tickets then the fans must be happy. We tend to stick with that notion, even when social media is explicitly telling us the opposite, because logic tells us that if people weren’t happy they would stop buying the tickets. In the wake of various ‘points of crisis’ for the music industry – including the Covid-19 pandemic; the permanent closure of grassroots music venue Bath Moles; and the drift towards high-value limited availability music experiences and away from local community access to live music – a fan-led review of live and electronic music was proposed by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in May 2024. If we are to compare the football and music industries, the crisis point for the balance between mega gigs and events and the availability of music on your doorstep hasn’t been as clearly crystallised as it was in football (by any attempt to create a Music Super league). However, it often doesn’t feel that far away from it. I’m writing this in the spirit of previous columns, where I warned that a failure to act to tackle the closure of grassroots music venues would inevitably end in the possibility of a statutory levy on ticket sales to create a fund to protect them. Now, I’m not claiming to be Nostradamus and that I can see into the future, but I do spend a lot of time on the ground in venues and social media circles with the average music fan. And I’m telling you that, in my experience, those fans are getting a lot noisier about what is happening to the music they love. The excellent collaborative effort to create and launch the Music Fans’ Voice Survey in February was an essential first step in us collectively engaging better with the music audience. The music business is under a lot of political scrutiny right now, with consultations on secondary ticketing, dynamic pricing, the crisis in GMVs, AI and a vast swathe of investigations into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats currently swirling around the creative industries. That climate, particularly at a political level, is reflective of a feeling ‘on the ground’ that the music ecosystem, despite headlines that might suggest otherwise, isn’t acting to best service the most important people there are – the fans. The fan survey is a great start. But we need to do more, including supporting the creation of a fans’ representative body and integrating that body into the conversations we have about the future of music. As with the risk of a statutory levy on tickets, taking action ourselves is the best way to manage the very real risk of a Statutory Regulator for Music. And it is highly likely that such a body might emerge from a fan-led review if that review is conducted against the backdrop of an industry that, for all our successes, feels more and more distant from the fans on which we rely.

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