Fantastic time for One Direction: 12m sales ahead of their imminent UK tour

One Direction have notched up an impressive £12m in record sales over the last year – outselling a string of prominent UK acts.

The five-piece boy band – Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, Liam Payne and Zayn Malik – are reported to have sold more records than top bands like Kasabian, Arctic Monkeys and Noel Gallagher’s High-Flying Birds put together.

Looking ahead to their UK tour in 2013

After a successful tour of the US, Harry and the lads have now set a string of new dates for their next UK tour. They’ll be kicking things off at London’s 02 Arena before heading over to Glasgow’s SECC, Cardiff, Dublin, Nottingham, Sheffield, Manchester and Newcastle. You can buy tickets at Stubhub, a popular new website where you can buy and sell tickets for top shows, concerts and sporting events all over the UK. Stubhub tickets are competitively priced – with seats available at London’s 02 for less than £70 – and under £75 at Birmingham’s NEC, for example.

Much of their success stems from their fame in both the US and the UK. And their debut single What Makes you Beautiful sold a staggering 5m copies (3m of which was in America). Perhaps even more impressively, 1D’s debut album Up All Night shifted 3m copies while their DVD was bought by a whopping 1m people worldwide.

The baby faced heart throbs have received the accolade of a special Sony disc from Sony Music and Simon Cowell’s company in recognition of what they have achieved in short a short time frame. But it would seem that the work doesn’t stop for the boys because they are reported to be releasing a new single early next month, with their second album due out before the end of the year.

If all this wasn’t enough, the Up All Night stars were paid an huge compliment this week: Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet said that he felt they should have closed a certain ceremony for a small sport event that kicked off this summer. He had felt that they were a better option than Sir Paul McCartney.

Speaking with the guys at Absolute Radio, Hadley told them that he would have preferred a younger band to have brought the spectacular ceremony to a close. “If you’ve got Sir Steve Redgrave handing over the torch to the youngsters, it would have been nice to have had One Direction. They’re our biggest export at the moment, pure pop”