Hyundai Mercury Prize winner Sampha re-enters Top 10 after 500% sales rise

Sampha has enjoyed a massive boost up this week's Official Chart following his win at this year's Hyundai Mercury Prize last week. 

New data from the Official Charts Company released jointly with UK labels body the BPI shows that combined sales and streams of Sampha's Process rose by 517% in the chart week following the South London singer-songwriter’s acclaimed Hyundai Mercury Prize win.

Demand for the album saw it shoot up spectacularly from Number 152 last week to Number 7 on this week’s Official Album Chart – matching its highest position when it was released in February earlier this year.  This is the first time that a Mercury Prize-winning album has entered or re-entered the Official Albums Chart Top 10 having been outside the Top 100 the week before.

The album benefited from a 458% surge in streams, with physical (CD/vinyl) and digital purchases growing by an equally impressive 540%. The song Sampha performed at the Mercury Prize Awards Show, (No One Knows Me) Like The Piano, also enjoyed a large increase in demand, being streamed over 342,000 times – a rise of 265 per cent on the previous chart week. 

Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive BPI, said: “The Hyundai Mercury Prize has a rich heritage in introducing new artists and their work to a much wider audience of music fans, and 2017 is no exception.  All the shortlisted artists will have received a boost in sales or profile, although as the Prize winner Sampha is seeing by far the biggest increase – propelling him towards the upper reaches of the Official Albums Chart and underlining his emergence as an exciting new British talent.

”The live performances by all the shortlisted artists on the night were spectacular, and we’d encourage any fan who missed them first time around to catch them on BBC iPlayer.”     

Other shortlisted albums enjoying a sales increase in the week since the awards ceremony include Kate Tempest's Let Them Eat Chaos (+59%), Glass Animals' How To Be A Human Being (+35%), Loyle Carner’s Yesterday’s Gone (+30%), The xx’s I See You (+23%) and The Big Moon's Love In The 4th Dimension (+19%).

The Hyundai Mercury Prize is known for giving new acts in particular a significant boost in profile and this year was no different, with seven debuts among the 12 shortlisted Albums of the Year. Jazz quartet Dinosaur's Together, As One was one of those debut albums, and the Mercury Prize had seismic effect on its sales – in the nine weeks following its shortlisting it sold 29 times the amount it had done in the nine weeks prior.

Article image: James Gourley/REX/Shutterstock