I was just reading an article about this weeks nielson soundscan sales. I found it amazing that an artist who was once so well liked and popular could come in this week with less than 10,000 copies sold. Fat Joe whos new album Jealous Ones Still Envy II dropped last week selling upwards of 8,300 copies which is horendous for an artist on a major label(Joe distributes his music on a major). Those sales may not even be sufficient for an artist who is on a strictly independant label. This is a guy who has gone platinum several times and you come to wonder if it is the material he is putting out or if the music buisness is in a state of emergency. I feel like the main problem is the heavy pirating of music over the internet. The record for highest 1st week sale for an album was in 2000 with Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP which sold 1.7 million its first week. I dont think we will ever see someone break this record. Music sales have gone down drastically over the last several years and labels are doing whatever they can to get people to buy albums. Labels are including special offers in with the album to make you want to buy it. It is just not seeming to work because artists just arent selling. Even Green Day who is nationally known and well recieved only went platinum with there latest record(they previously have gone double and triple platinum).I personally have begun buying albums again recently but i fell into the same category as everyone else for a long time. We really need to think about how the artists put so much work into there album for people to steal it. However it has been made so easy, that to buy an album that you can just download for free almost seems ridiculous. Soon enough i think everything is going to be made digitally since almost no one minus maybe Eminem, Jay-Z, and Green Day are selling anymore. This upsets me being such a music fan.
It's crazy to think about how going platinum was such a big accomplishment back in the day when album sales actually mattered. I think you make a good point about how anyone can download an album now in a matter of seconds. It must be hard to artists to really consider there record sales since must of the music people get is illegal. Maybe in the future, when everything does goes digital, there will be a new term for deciding the scale in which artists sell music with programs like iTunes or Rhapsody.
ReplyDeleteas sad as it is record sales just dont matter like they used to, i think top artists are going to have to be decided by ticket/merchandise sales in the future.
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