The top 20 fastest-selling albums
Year: 2003
First week sales: 400,351
Until the arrival of Susan Boyle, Dido’s second album was the fastest-selling by a female artist. The seventh best-selling album of the noughties, it sold 102,500 copies on the first day before selling an extra 300,000 by the end of the week. It was huge in the rest of the world too, with sales of 12 million making it the year’s fourth best-seller. Buoyed by the success of the single White Flag, the album spent 10 weeks at the top of the UK charts and hung around the album charts for 54 weeks. Her follow-up, Safe Trip Home, which took five years to make, was a low-key affair that spent 10 barely noticed weeks in the charts.
