The Official Top 40 Biggest Selling Artist Albums Of 2013

Thanks to One Direction, Emeli Sande, Robbie Williams and Olly Murs, British acts account for 60% of The Official Top 40 Biggest Selling Artist Albums Of 2013.

British acts ruled the UK’s albums market in 2013, according to the Official Charts Company’s end of year sales data published today by British recorded music trade body, The BPI.

Releases by home-grown talent accounted for 60% of The Official Top 40 Biggest Selling Artist Albums Of 2013 (24 albums out of 40), while in the Top 10 the percentage is even higher at 80%.

One Direction’s Midnight Memories was the biggest selling artist album of 2013.  Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik sold an impressive 685,000 copies of their third-full length, which was only released five weeks before the year-end chart was compiled. The boys surged ahead of Emeli Sande’s Our Version Of Events in the final sales week of the year to clinch victory.

Midnight Memories is also the fastest selling artist album of 2013, shifting more than 237,000 copies during its first week on sale back in November – the biggest opening week tally for any of 1D’s albums.

“This tops an amazing year for us!” Liam Payne told OfficialCharts.com. “We're so excited to have the biggest selling album in the UK this year, especially with a record we are all so proud of. We'd like to thank everyone who has bought the album, it really means a lot to us.”

One Direction’s 2012 album, Take Me Home, also makes an appearance in The Official Top 40 Biggest Selling Artist Albums Of 2013 at Number 22. It sold 290,000 copies during 2013 / 906,000 total.

Emeli Sande finishes the year at Number 2 with her debut album, Our Version Of Events (683,000 sales during 2013). The Scottish singer, who claimed The Official Biggest Selling Album Of 2012 this time last year, continued to break new ground in 2013. Our Version Of Events became the longest running debut album to feature in the Official Albums Charts Top 10, racking up 66 consecutive weeks from release, and beating a record held by The Beatles’ Please Please Me for nearly 60 years.

"I’m completely lost for words,” Emeli told OfficialCharts.com. “This is something I could only have dreamed of! The Beatles are the greatest band of all time and their legacy lives on and continues to inspire all of us that make music.”  

To date, more than 2.07 million copies of Our Version Of Events have been purchased in the UK.

Canadian crooner Michael Buble has scored the third biggest selling artist album of 2013 with To Be Loved (631,000 sales). Buble is the only international star in the Top 5, and the only act besides One Direction to have two albums in the Top 40 – his mega-selling Christmas album is at Number 29 with sales of 230,000 copies during 2013 / 2.03 million in total.

Robbie Williams finishes the year at Number 4 with his latest Big Band album, Swigs Both Ways (626,000 sales). Released in November, Swings Both Ways became the 1000th album to reach Number 1 on the UK's Official Albums Chart. It was also Robbie‘s 11th chart-topping album on these shores, which draws him level with chart legend Elvis Presley who also has 11 Number 1s to his name.

The Top 5 is completed by Olly Murs’ Right Place, Right Time (Number 5). Originally released in 2012, Olly's third album has sold 1.19 million copies to date, with 623,000 of those being in the last year.

The Official Artist Albums Chart Of 2013 In Numbers

As well as UK artists dominating the Official Albums Chart over the last twelve months, it seems the British record buying public couldn’t get enough of male solo acts, either!

Male artists account for 45% of The Official Top 40 Biggest Selling Artist Albums Of 2013 (18 out of 40), and 60% of the Top 10. Groups make up 35% of the Top 40 (14/40), while female artists account for 17.5% (7/40). The remaining 2.5% belongs to the cast recording from Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables (Number 12 on the year-end chart).

Sales of digital albums were up 6.8% on 2012, with some 32.6 million albums being legally downloaded during 2013. The most-downloaded artist album was Bastille's debut full-length, Bad Blood (Number 11). 

Bastille frontman Dan Smith told OfficialCharts.com: "It's very surreal to hear something like that, but really good to see how some people have embraced our album."

15% (6/40) of The Official Top 40 Biggest Selling Artist Albums Of 2013 were debut albums released during 2013. Bastille’s Bad Blood is the biggest selling debut album released in the last calendar year (11). It is followed by Rudimental’s Home (17), James Arthur’s self-titled album (30), London Grammar’s If You Want (33), Tom Odell’s Long Way Down (34) and Disclosure’s Settle (40).

The Official Top 40 Biggest Selling Artist Albums Of 2013

© 2014 Official Charts Company. All rights reserved.

MORE: See the Official Biggest Selling Artist Albums of 2014

MORE: See the Official Biggest Artist Albums of 2015 so far