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Shifting units

SoundScan released statistics for the first six months of 2007 last week, and they aren't good for the top end of the music business. Which, if you believe in trickle-down economics, doesn't portend well for the rest of us. Though I wonder, reading that Ryan Adams just had his best first-week sales, if we're seeing what a bond trader friend called "the flight to quality," which happens every time the financial markets get rocky.

Regardless, some highlights, courtesy the Associated Press:

Album sales are down 15 percent from 2006, totaling 229.8-million. Which is still a lot.

Digital tracks increased 49 percent, to 417.3-million. Which is also a lot, but if you figure 10 tracks to an album that's 41.7-million albums downloaded, which doesn't yet make the MP3 the dominant paradigm, no matter the hype.

Factoring digital and physical sales together, sales are down only [sic] 9.2 percent.

Chris Daughtry's self-titled album is the big seller over these six months, at 1.7-million. The fact that I haven't heard a lick should, perhaps, tell me how far out of touch I am. Though I never felt obliged to listen to Hootie & The Blowfish, either.

Gwen Stefani's "Sweet Escape" has sold 1.8-million digital downloads, top downloaded single of the first six months of 2007.

The top-selling country album, Carrie Underwood's Some Hearts, tops out at 1.1-million.

I don't mean to slap too hard at Hootie, but once upon a time they sold 16-million albums. Not so long ago the O Brother soundtrack sold 7-million (and the Eagles greatest hits tops the RIAA all-time chart at 29-million sold, which is alarming).

Doubtless this all reflects a number of interwoven trends, including the increasing diversification of audiences and subgenres and, perhaps, a fallow creative period in mainstream music. And, of course, if the big labels are feeling financially pinched, that means they have less money to spend blowing up our next pop star. (Though I would note that O Brother and no few other albums rose to popularity more organically than did, say, well, Gwen Stefani.)

But I continue to feel as if the industry has foolishly devalued its own product.

And, in particular, we reap the whirlwind of destroying retail.

For most people, music is an impulse purchase, and it's easy to forget about. It's everywhere, anyhow, so why buy it?

Except you used to drive down the street and see these colorful signs for record stores. And their windows, if you were stopped at the light, were filled with these garish posters for artists who you might or might not be familiar with on the radio. At some point all those impressions might succeed in making you interested in buying an album or two, in walking through the doors. Maybe the casual consumer was killing time in the mall while friends or spouses or children were on some other errand. Maybe they just retreated to the music section at Target or (heaven forbid) Wal-Mart. Only today those sections are much smaller, less obviously placed, and have far fewer choices, and there are far fewer reminders that one could and might BUY music than once there were. Or perhaps they glanced upon an advert in their local newspaper or entertainment magazine, paid for by co-op dollars funneled to retail. In today's retail ecology most of those impressions have been lost.

So fewer people are buying recorded music. It will be interesting, at the end of the year, to see what the PollStar numbers reveal about live performance.

The music industry seems to believe the blithe lie that MP3s will make a good replacement for retail. Maybe some day they will, but too many executives seem to forget that not everybody has a computer, not everybody has a high speed internet connection, and not everybody can afford (nor sees reason to afford) a new MP3 device every 18 months when gas is expensive and there are children to feed. And so they keep winnowing down the potential audience. Like, I don't know, maybe by 9 percent?

Online browsing seems to me to be far more intentional and directed than stumbling upon things in an actual store with real people and the freak from high school behind the counter spinning some album you'd never heard before at just the right volume to make you think about buying it. (Do you really want that guy changing your oil because he's lost his job at the record store?)

I hope the book publishing industry is paying attention.

Posted by grant on July 7, 2007 9:32 AM | Permalink