People buy and listen to their music where they buy and listen to their music. I, as a content provider, can’t influence that. There are many people in this business that say, ‘I wish people still bought vinyl. I wish people still bought CDs.’ But you can’t base your business on that.
X5’s Stockholm-based staff of 10 producers has churned out more than 5,000 classical compilations, creating as many as 400 in a week. The producers often rely on sales data to determine, for instance, what should go into compilations like “The 99 Most Essential Chopin Masterpieces,” which was ranked No. 1 Tuesday on Amazon MP3’s classical best-sellers chart. Priced at $1.29, the collection has ranked among the site’s 100 top-selling classical albums for 20 months.
The Internet’s $10 Million [Classical] Mix Tapes (WSJ)
Most of me is strongly to opposed to all of this, as I’m so firmly rooted in the tradition that certain elite artistic directors, musicians, and musicologists should be determining what the “most essential Chopin masterpieces” are.
On the other hand, it works, and it’s getting this music into people’s ears. I’m not surprised that Naxos is the first US record label to licence their catalog to them, as their missions are not dissimilar, with focus on a low price.
Relevant article cut out and left for me by a cute husband.
The biggest gainers are classical music, up 13% to 3.8 million.
LA Times on the Neilsen Soudscan report I mentioned last week.
Still minuscule compared to the 52.3 million that rock sold, but pretty nice.
Music sales are up for the first time in 7 years (!)
Nielsen SoundScan recently reported that record sales are up for the first time in my grown-up life, largely because of increased digital track and album sales (via NYT). I tried to find the actual report to see how classical sales fit into all of this, but haven’t had luck yet.
What I did see was this post about the current #1 classical artist on the Billboard chart: Jackie Evancho, an 11 year old singer who won 2nd place on America’s Got Talent. Eek. How can we sell legit classical concerts to people who only learn about classical musicians from watching the Ellen DeGeneres show?
Once people have their iPod filled up with songs, they’re not going to start buying lots and lots more.
Jean Littolff, managing director of Nielsen Music, said many consumers had restocked their music collection after moving from CDs to MP3 players, leaving little extra impetus to music sales other than the latest releases. (Financial Times)
I’m surprised that initial MP3 sales growth is partially attributed to consumers “restocking their music collection after moving from CDs to MP3 players”. Unlike switching from vinyl to CD, the process to convert CDs to MP3s is free and takes just about the same amount of tech savvy and time as purchasing new MP3s.
Buyouts of his CDs are routinely organized by groups such as the self-designated Bieber Army (one girl with the Facebook name Lauren Love Bieber told me that she had bought his first album, My World, nine times, My World 2.0 seventeen times, and the “Baby” single 24 times). When a new single comes out, fans mobilize online to drive it to the top of iTunes.
Justin Bieber Can Hear Them Scream (New York Magazine)
My World, $9.98 x 9 = $89.82
My World 2.0, $7.99 x 17 = $135.83
Baby, $0.99 x 24 = $23.76
Total: $249.41
This is pretty insane. Tween girls are irrational by nature, so I can see why they would want to do this, but where are they getting this kind of money?
I’m tired of all of these “charts of the decade” and mentions of Nickelback as the “band of the decade”. Shit hit the fan for the record industry during the past 10 years, enough that data from 2000 can’t even be compared to data from 2007.
Case in point, the last page of the current Rolling Stone lists the Top 40 Albums of the past decade, based on Nielsen Soundscan sales data. As I read through the list, I was struck by how old all of the albums seemed. I looked up all of the release years and confirmed that this list does not include ANY albums released since 2005. Why even bother? Limp Bizkit and Creed are not some of the most important artists of the entire decade; people just stopped buying albums in 2002.
