Earlier today we reported that a handful of independent music shops experienced their best sales day ever on Saturday, April 19 — the 2014 installment of Record Store Day. Now we know which of the holiday’s exclusive releases outsold the others, thanks to Nielsen SoundScan and Border City Media’s BuzzAngle Music. The top three albums were: Tame Impala’s Live Versions, Grateful Dead’s Live at Hampton Coliseum, and Joy Division’s An Ideal For Living.
Meanwhile, the winning singles came from: Nirvana with “Pennyroyal Tea,” the Flaming Lips and Devo’s “Gates of Steel,” and the Cure and Dinosaur Jr’s “Just Like Heaven.” The ranking of those comes from RSD and BuzzAngle, though Billboard and Nielsen show different results in their overall top 10 for vinyl full-lengths and short-players for the week beginning Monday, April 14. View those below and continue on for more stats on the big day.
Billboard’s best-selling vinyl LPs for the week ending April 20:
1. Childish Gambino, Because the Internet
2. Afghan Whigs, Do to the Beast
3. Notorious B.I.G., Life After Death
4. Bruce Springsteen, American Beauty
5. Jimi Hendrix, Live at Monterey
6. Grateful Dead, Live at Hampton Coliseum
7. Tame Impala, Live Versions
8. Joy Division, An Ideal For Living
9. Flaming Lips, 7 Skies H3
10. Ramones, Meltdown With the Ramones
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Billboard’s best-selling vinyl singles for the week ending April 20:
1. Nirvana, “Pennyroyal Tea”
2. Flaming Lips & Devo, “Gates of Steel”
3. The Cure & Dinosaur Jr, “Just Like Heaven”
4. David Bowie, “1984”
5. Love & Rush, “7 and 7 is”
6. Frank Zappa, “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow”
7. Pantera & Poison Idea, “The Badge”
8. Paramore, “Ain’t It Fun”
9. Fleetwood Mac, “Dragonfly”
10. Garbage, “Girls Talk Shit”
Of those 20 releases, only one was not RSD-affiliated: the Afghan Whigs album. (Others may not have made it into BuzzAngle’s official numbers as some releases will eventually be widely sold.) Furthermore, SoundScan says: of the top 50 vinyl LPs sold over that entire week, 43 were either RSD exclusives, or widely released for the first time; 68 different LPs sold more than 1,000 copies each (up from 17 this same week in 2013); vinyl LP sales overall rose 176 percent from the previous week; and vinyl single sales rose more than 3,100 percent. If all that wasn’t good enough news, year-to-date vinyl sales are up 36 percent versus this same time in 2013.
Shop on, America.
