THE DEPRESSING STATE OF THE RECORD INDUSTRY
Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 11:08am by Vince Neilstein
The sales of recorded music are in as bleak a state as ever, and this week’s Soundscan charts paint the picture. The screenshot at left is from the Top 25 of this week’s charts; the column in the middle is the percentage each album dropped from last week to this week. Excepting the Total Club Hits compilation which debuted at #16 (the “999%” entry you see), you have to go all the way down to #52 to find an album that actually increased sales from week to week.
The “Hard Music” charts tell the same story. Theory of a Deadman are up 12% and Apocalyptica are up 6% week over week, while Bon Jovi’s Crossroads jumped an inexplicable 135% (whether the latter should be considered “hard music” is an entirely different debate). Outside of those you’ve got to go all the way down to Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits at #43 — up a whole 11% and shifting an astounding 2,563 units last week — to find a record making positive headway.
What. The. Fuck! Are we seeing the typical post-holiday doldrums or overall industry decline? Either way, those are some fucking depressing numbers.
-VN
We’re fucked!!
Time to go back to college and get a real degree.
“I want to be a dancer”
I don’t know if this could be the reason, but that Bon Jovi record was Amazon MP3’s deal of the day last week. You could download it for like $2. That might explain the jump
I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that most mainstream music sucks.
It seems like the major labels haven’t been able to understand a couple of their biggest problems. They need to realize that a.) theirs is clearly a failed business model, and b.) CD’s are the height of an outdated medium. It doesn’t surprise me that normal people don’t want to spend anywhere from $10 to $16 on a format that is the size of a Blu-Ray disc, but can only fit less than a gig of information on it (especially when 80 percent of that information is totally unremarkable). Granted, I don’t know what the answer to the format problem is, but clearly, no one else does either.
That being said, I hope declining record sales don’t result in a lot of independent labels folding up. It seems like indies have a more loyal consumer base, and I strongly encourage anyone who claims to support independent music to do so by purchasing it. To do otherwise seems somewhat hypocritical.
Wait, I’ve been visiting this site long enough to know that 99% of its authors and readership thinks record sales = sell out = corporate rock = radio drivel. So, why does anyone here care? I thought the badge of honor was growing a long beard (aka hiding an ugly mug), being brutal for the sake of being brutal and selling 400 albums and forsaking a big label.
It always brings a smile to my face everytime I see stuff like this. Hopefully once the record industry takes it’s final big shit and completely collaspes, FM radio will go with it. They brought this on themselves, pumped out shit music and reaped the rewards for so long, now it’s over! FUCK YEAH!
“People just want to be small, no ones fucking going for it, no one wants to be big, no one wants to be Elvis, no one wants to be John Lennon, they all just wanna be just little fucking indie shitheads…I haven’t got the time for that” – Liam Gallagher aka not metal but more metal than any metal musician
I second groverXIII.
@Sammy
That’s true man. This should be great news! We should be happy that the bands we listen to aren’t popular. Because if they actually got some credit/money for being the practitioners of bad assery they are, that would mean they sold out.
Still haven’t figured out what this “vagina” thing is you spoke of a few months ago.
I still buy tons of cd’s, albeit mostly used ones which run about 4-8 dollars rather than the 12-16 range. The sound quality of mp3’s suck in comparison (depending on bit rate) and unique and interesting packaging (i.e. cynic’s traced in air or the ocean’s precambrian) still make cd’s worth owning, especially if you are a lazy stoner who will take the time to notice all that stuff. Thirdly, beards rule.
It’s like someone said before, it’s a bad business model on the part of the record labels. CDs in physical sales don’t account for much anymore and that needs to change dramatically.
But, also, no one listens to the radio like they used to and millions of people aren’t getting into the same artists.
There are niche markets now for every type of music, especially metal, so you’ll really only reach those communities, because radio only plays top 40, adult contemporary or stuff that was already done in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
No one is a millionaire rockstar anymore except Kanye West. :)
Uh, we’ve just come out of Christmas, most people have either spent up then, or at the post christmas sales. It will probably be like this for another few weeks until people have sold their children to pay off their credit cards. I’d be interested to see if you could actually do some investigation to find out if this dive is consistent each year at this time. Or is that too much work for everyone at the MS Mansion?
@ Chumplunt: Way too much work. Get on that!
I want to see what it looks like once people start getting their tax returns!