One Direction coverage boosts Sun on Sunday sales by 2%

News Group title sees biggest increase on previous month of Sunday newspapers, but circulation still down 9.7% year-on-year

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The coverage of boyband One Direction's latest tour helped to boost The Sun on Sunday's sales last month by 2% to 1.7 million copies which was the largest increase of all the Sunday papers.The News Group title sold an average of 1,721,068 copies in April, up just over 2% on March but down 9.7% year-on-year, according to figures published by the Audit Bureau of Circulations figures published on Friday.

The paper also saw an increase in sales with scoops about boxer Amir Khan and actor Kym Marsh. Its rivals the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Mirror were also up – the Mail on Sunday growing by 0.7% on the previous month to 1,566,728, while the Trinity Mirror title was marginally up by 0.1% to 928,697.

Year-on-year both titles went down

The Mail on Sunday at 7.7%

And the Sunday Mirror at 10.2%.

In a buoyant month for the mid-market and tabloid titles, only the Daily Star Sunday was down on the previous month, slipping 0.3% to 291,439, and down 11.7% year-on-year.

The evidence suggests how the demand for print and newspapers is in decline as people aren't as interested in gaining their news from newspapers due to online sources being easier to access, free and there is a much wider range of content. 

One-quarter of Spotify tracks are skipped in first five seconds, study reveals

Analysis of unique user habits shows that attention spans are short, with listeners skipping songs once every four minutes

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One-quarter of all songs played on Spotify are skipped within the first five seconds of listening, according to a new study carried out via music analysis company The Echo Nest.

Proving that our music listening habits are becoming increasingly more fractured, the study, which was published by director of developer platform Paul Lamere, looks primarily into the "skip" habits of users of the streaming service. A skip is registered each time a listener abandons a song before the song has completely finished, either because the listener explicitly presses the skip button, they clicked on a different song or they searched for and started another song before the current song ended.

The series of graphs were created by processing billions of plays from millions of unique listeners worldwide. The graphs show that nearly one-quarter of all songs played are skipped in the first five seconds, with the likelihood that a song will be skipped within the first 30 seconds rising to 35.05%. An average listener skips a song once every four minutes, and there is a 48.6% chance that a song will be skipped before it ends.

While there is very little difference between the male and female skipping rate (male listeners' rate is 44.75% and female listeners is 45.23%), the mobile skipping rate (51.1%) is greater than the desktop skipping rate (40.1%), meaning that those on their handheld devices interact and divert much more regularly than solitary desktop users.