Album Sales Down Again – Solution: More Celebrity Deaths
The news on album sales hasn’t changed much over the past decade or so… you could sum it all up in one word, DOWN.
I was going to have a graph in here to help you visualize it, but instead, we can get interactive. Get a piece of paper and pen. Start in the top left corner and draw a line to the bottom right corner. Label the X-Axis “time”, and the Y-Axis “album sales” BOOM, visualized!
Interestingly enough, we saw a bit of slowing to the downturn this past quarter. Michael Jackson’s death and the re-release of The Beatles’ catalogue (selling 2.25M copies in 5 days) were a molasses to the decline of album sales, but figures are still abysmal. Even with the 6+ Million albums sold last quarter by the aforementioned artists alone, we’re down about 14% from album sales in 2008, which was down about the same from 2007.
It wasn’t as though we had shoddy artists putting out this year either. 2009 saw new albums from U2, Green Day, Dave Matthews Band, Eminem and countless other staple platinum sellers. It’s actually kind of interesting that the biggest selling music of 09 thus far was music recorded 20-40 years ago.
Of the 115,000 albums released, only 110 broke the quarter million mark; that’s less than 0.001%. And that’s only the halfway mark of going gold. Less than 6,000 albums even sold 1,000 copies.
What will help turn it around? I’m pretty sure MJ can’t die again… and The Beatles’ content (save coming to iTunes) can’t really be repackaged again. Apple’s iTunes LP might help drive a bit more energy behind album sales, but the adoption has been limited and slow at best.
Perhaps the answer isn’t in selling more albums, as I’ve alluded to before, but in using the music as a tool to sell other goods (live tickets, merchandise, licensing to commercial use, films, ring tones, etc.). Wasn’t it a few years ago that the number one selling song in the UK was a ring tone?
(stat source: Chicago Trib)Tweet
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