KEY POINTS:
The music industry has hailed 2006 as a new golden age for British rock and pop after UK artists achieved their best sales figures in nearly a decade.
A slew of strong-selling debuts from the likes of Arctic Monkeys and Corinne Bailey Rae and a buzz around digital formats saw British performers take a 61.9 per cent share of sales.
Seven of the top 10 albums of the year were by British acts with Snow Patrol's Eyes Open the biggest seller, selling more than 1.5 million copies.
Another four British acts sold more than a million copies of their albums - Take That, Arctic Monkeys, The Kooks and Razorlight.
Altogether, this was the best result since 1997, a year when The Spice Girls, The Verve, Oasis and The Prodigy dominated the charts.
Announcing the figures yesterday, Peter Jamieson, chairman of the British Phonogoraphic Industry, said: "Two years ago, we predicted we were entering a new golden age for British music.
"These numbers confirm that British music is going through an outstandingly creative period which is capturing the imagination of music buyers." He praised British record labels for finding and promoting a diverse range of talent.
All three top-selling albums in 2006 were from acts - Snow Patrol, Take That and the American band Scissor Sisters - signed to the UK label Polydor.
There were 14 debut albums from British artists in the top 100 compared with eight the year before.
They included the singer-songwriters James Morrison and Paulo Nutini, The Fratellis, Lily Allen and Shayne Ward, the winner of the 2005 X Factor contest.
It was a year when the internet came into its own with Arctic Monkeys fans generating an enormous buzz around the young Sheffield band even before the release of their first single.
Their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, became the fastest-selling debut album of all time, with more than 363,000 sales in the first week of release.
It was the most successful debut of the year.
And downloading moved from being the preserve of the clued-up music geek to the norm.
Digital accounted for 79 per cent of all singles sales with the biggest single of the year, Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy", selling in excess of 400,000.
The numbers are so high that they finally prompted a rethink of the charts, which are now being prepared under a new system which will include all digital releases irrespective of whether an accompanying physical format is being made available.
The first charts compiled by the Official Charts Company under the new rules will be released tomorrow.
Some retailers fear that this might encourage record labels to abandon physical formats altogether in the long-run.
But Peter Jamieson said the rebirth of the singles market driven by downloads proved that music could reinvent itself through new technology.
"Just a couple of years ago, some commentators predicted the death of the single," he said.
"We are now looking at a market which has doubled in three years, thanks to downloads."
The singles market was up 39.7 per cent in 2006 thanks to the massive increase in downloads, returning it to the sort of levels seen in the 1990s.
Digital album sales have also increased although they still comprise only 1.4 per cent of the total album market.
Some British artists have secured corresponding success in America, which has traditionally proved a tough market to crack.
Both James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" and Natasha Bedingfield's "Unwritten" made the year-end top 10 singles chart.
And Blunt joined K T Tunstall and Bailey Rae in hitting the American albums chart as well.
- INDEPENDENT
