5
Music album sales at historic low
pile of CDs
To view this content, Javascript must be enabled and Adobe Flash Player must be installed.
TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: Topping the charts in the music business used to mean something back in the day. Not so much anymore. This week, the number one Billboard spot goes to an album by the alternative rock band Cake -- having sold just 44,000 copies. That's the saddest showing ever for a number one album.
Marketplace's Steve Henn reports.
Steve Henn: After taking a six-year break, the band Cake produced its latest album, "Showroom of Compassion," in its own solar-powered studio. It released the record on its own label and it shot to the top of the charts.
And that's a bad sign for big labels. Mark Mulligan is an analyst with Forrester Research in Britain. He says these record breakingly bad sales figures are just the latest sign this industry is dying.
Mark Mulligan: People are listening to more music now across the more platforms and devices than any stage previously. What has changed is that people aren't paying for it in the way that they used to.
CD sales have collapsed and actual sales of digital music sales only rose by 7 percent globally last year. Mulligan says there are just too many other ways to listen, from digital piracy to legitimate sites like Pandora or YouTube. And, if you really have to own Britney Spears' latest single, you can join the nearly half million people who downloaded it last week and skip her album.
Clip from Britney Spears' "Hold It Against Me": Would you hold it against me?
The answer is probably yes, at least if you are an executive in the music business.
In Silicon Valley, I'm Steve Henn for Marketplace.
I second Sam. I tunes just hit its 10 billionth download. That comes out to 9 billion 900 thousand dollars in revenue just from iTunes sales. Fact is CD's and Vinils are not the mainstream anymore, and the Billboard charts only take into account shipped "record" sales and/or radio playtime. Someone needs to account for digital distribution of this content otherwise you are giving us spurious statistics.
Same story, updated stats. Maybe if the people got a better return on all the pay cuts we've been taking on behalf of record executives and the ridiculous "incentive" packages thrown around to the top tier capitalists in America, we'd have more disposable income to shell out on music. It's not record execs who worry about this crap, they'll be good and dead by the time this all collapses anyway. Stop trying to save a Terry Schiavo.
I think we're honestly heading to a place where music if you're good, can earn you a middle class living if you approach it like everyone else does there job: never done, and not especially glamorous unless you're on tour. To me there's nothing wrong with the end of musicians who aren't good being forced down our throats thanks to record label monopoly.
So, are we lamenting whole album sales, or song sales in general? If Cake sold 44,000 albums, but sold 1 million copies of one song for $0.99 a pop, they've still made $1 million. And, if this business were so unprofitable, I'd imagine that major record labels would stop supporting artists like Britney Spears.
