Coldplay album outsells the rest of the top 40 combined

Coldplay’s 10th album, Moon Music, has charted at number one in the UK, selling more copies than the rest of the Top 40 combined.

The record shifted 237,000 UK chart units – a measure that incorporates streams, downloads and physical sales – over the last seven days, said the Official Charts Company.

It is the biggest opening week for a British album since Adele’s 30 was released in 2021.

Coldplay now draw level with ABBA, Michael Jackson and Queen on the list of acts with the most number ones on the official albums chart, each with 10 apiece. The Beatles hold the all-time record, having topped the chart 16 times.

“Thank you to everyone who supported the release of Moon Music,” the band posted on social media as the charts were revealed.

“It truly means the world.”

The majority of Moon Music’s sales – some 209,000 – were on CD and vinyl, suggesting that it is not being streamed in extraordinary numbers.

However, the songs Feels Like I’m Falling In Love and We Pray were played often enough to land just inside the Top 20 of this week’s singles chart.

Twenty-five years after their debut, the band have been having fun promoting their latest record.

Last week, the quartet hosted a half-hour segment on the shopping channel QVC, and frontman Chris Martin appeared on Jimmy Fallon’s US chat show in disguise as “Nigel”, an inept busker whose songs bore no resemblance to the originals.

At a record store appearance in New York, Martin serenaded a 70-year-old fan who had turned up to see them on her birthday.

A day earlier, he improvised an entirely new song in Brooklyn, after a fan tried to request the song Fix You, but actually shouted: “Play ‘Fix It’.

All of that promotional activity, combined with performances on Saturday Night Live and the morning TV show Today (where they were accompanied by puppets), means that Coldplay are expected to top the US Billboard charts this week, too.

If they manage it, it will be the first time a British band has been at number one on both sides of the Atlantic since The 1975 achieved the feat with their 2016 album, I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It.

However, not even Coldplay could challenge Taylor Swift’s UK chart throne.

The band fell just short of the 270,000 first-week sales she achieved for The Tortured Poets Department in April – meaning she still holds the record for the biggest first-week sales of the year.

Over in the singles chart, breakout pop star Sabrina Carpenter has made history as the woman with the most weeks at number one in a single year.

The Pennsylvania-born singer has now spent 19 weeks at the top of the countdown in 2024, thanks to three hit singles: Espresso (seven weeks), Please Please Please (five weeks) and Taste (seven weeks and counting).

She overtakes Olivia Newton-John, who spent 16 weeks at number one in 1978, and draws level with Ed Sheeran for the most weeks at number one in a calendar year this century.

Meanwhile, Netflix’s controversial true-crime drama Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story has sent two vintage hits back into the top 40.

Crowded House’s 1987 single Don’t Dream It’s Over reappears at number 37, followed by Milli Vanilli’s I’m Gonna Miss You at number 40.

Viewers of the show will know that the latter track was, somewhat bizarrely, played by the Menendez Brothers at their parents’ funeral in 1989.

The choice seemed so inappropriate that the creator of the Netflix show, Ryan Murphy, had to confirm it had happened in real life, commenting that the choice was something “you really can’t make up”.