I think I hear an industry dying...
I don’t want to sound like a broken record (yes, pun intended) but I’ve been thinking about those Billboard numbers since the Shins topped out at number 2 for their first week with about 112,000 sales. What happens week 2? Well thanks to this New York Times article we can get an idea of what happens. Here’s what happened to Modest Mouse – “Last week’s chart-topper, Modest Mouse’s ‘We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank’ (Epic), fell to No. 11 with 48,000 sales, a 64 percent decline.”
And it’s not just rock that’s in decline, it seems to be across the board – “The country star Tim McGraw, with “Let It Go’ (Curb), is No. 1 with 325,000 copies sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That qualifies as one of the biggest openings of the year, though “Let It Go’ moved less than half what Mr. McGraw’s last studio album, “Live Like You Were Dying,’ did in its debut week three years ago. The rapper Young Buck bowed at No. 3 with 140,000 sales of “Buck the World’ (Interscope)”. – Rap and Country were once the bread and butter for the music industry….
are they tracking digital sales? a digital unit and retail unit should be treated the same. when over half the album is downloaded it could equal an album ’sale’. perhaps a single download could be recognized as a ’single’—I like the verbage there: anything that would somehow take us back to that magical era of the cassingle is fine with me. cd singles are weak. cassingles are sassy.
April 5th, 2007 at 1:39 pmJon, yes digital sales are now tracked by Billboard. Modest Mouse’s numbers include downloads from iTunes who were apparently the biggest retailer of those sales, being roughly 30% of the totals sold. So now you can see why the 64% drop off week 2 – the fans bought it as quickly as possible, and a large amount of those fans downloaded it. That also means of course that those 30% downloaders didn’t set foot in a retail store meaning more bad news for you hight street retailer.
April 6th, 2007 at 9:48 amWhen the record labels killed the single they killed their business…….