A month ahead of its release, Susan Boyle’s album has more advance orders on Amazon.com than any CD in the retailer’s history, it said.
The Sony album, titled “I Dreamed a Dream,” goes on sale on Nov. 23. Ms. Boyle sang the song by the same name on “Britain’s Got Talent,” and the video of her unexpectedly strong performance made her a world-wide phenomenon after it landed on video-sharing sites like YouTube.
Is it possible that the music industry has finally spotted the light at the end of the tunnel–and it’s not the flashing light on the oncoming Pirate Express locomotive?
The music industry’s turbulent ride in the digital age continues to get bumpier with mostly cloudy skies ahead. Overall album sales continue to dip in the double digits while the number of singles being sold — generally at less than a dollar apiece — are not sufficient to replace the lost revenue brought in by albums.
After having $10 billion wiped off their collective worldwide revenues this decade, the four major music labels haven’t had much to crow about. Indie labels, which have banded together to negotiate as Merlin, together are as large as EMI, the smallest of the majors.
More than half of young people copy the songs on their hard drives to friends and even more swap CD copies, according to research that reveals the huge challenge home copying poses to a music industry already battling Internet file-sharing. Three decades after cassette decks first allowed people to make free music tapes for friends, a study by the industry group British Music Rights suggests home copying remains just as ingrained in U.K. culture.
Wal-mart wants every CD you buy to cost less than 10 bucks. And the nation’s largest retailer–which moved a quarter of a trillion dollars’ worth of goods last year–usually gets its way. Suppliers who don’t accede to Wal-Mart’s “everyday low price” mantra often find their products bounced from the chain’s stores, excluded from being sold to the 138 million people who shop at a Wal-Mart store every week.
The Qtrax debacle is getting most of the attention this week, with Warner Music’s ridiculous CEO compensation close behind, but there is promising news in the music industry worth noting. Late last year, there was much fuss around Radiohead’s decision to eschew usual distribution schemes and release “In Rainbows” in a variety of formats, among them free downloads. It was no surprise that the marketing plan worked well and, more recently, helped the on-CD version of the new album top many sales charts. Radiohead is an extremely popular band; of course its experiment did well. But if there’s going to be a music industry anymore, it’s going to be because nonplatinum performers can make a living as musicians.
There once was a time when the release date of an album was exciting. For our favorite artists, we knew when the last album came out and when the next album was due. If you loved the artist, you bought it. If you didn’t, you either bought the single or you listened to the album with your friends and then decided.
As the price of records and then CDs increased year by year, spending 20 bucks for a CD became a purchase you needed to be sure of rather than a no-brainer or impulse buy.
Then free became an option.
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Jack Frost ripping a CD.
Online piracy is creating a modern-day twist on “The Christmas Song.” Nat King Cole’s recording of the holiday standard is among the most popular downloads on file-sharing networks this year.
What do I do now?
In 1991, I released my first record on MCA (or MCI, as my mom always mistakenly told her friends, hoping to impress them). I was bummed, as I had just missed the opportunity to have my face big on an album cover. But vinyl was over, and the CD format (with [...]
Recently I produced a CD. It was independently recorded and distributed–and it was available for free on every peer-to-peer service on the planet weeks before it was officially released, so it was only a modest commercial success.
Don’t feel bad. It was entirely expected. Even if there was such a thing as a record industry anymore, [...]
I keep reading how the music industry killed the CD and now nobody on the Web can sell anything longer than a three-minute download. How odd. I sell music–on some days, I believe, more of a given CD than any single store in the country, including Amazon.com–and I do it from a Web site that never has more than 7,000 visitors a day.
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