This week is the worst week in album sales since 1991

Din Of Win · #1 05-20-2010, 11:35 AM

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...es-since-1991/

What's everyones take on this? Are 'albums' something you all still produce, or have you skirted this down-turn by adapting to digital formats or colectable albums (via vinyl)?

pasta4lnch · #2 05-20-2010, 11:37 AM

Methinks it's time to cut my loses, go back to school and get outta this biz!!! SCARY that it keeps getting worse . . . how much more down can it go?

IPA · #3 05-20-2010, 11:41 AM

As a consumer, I still buy albums. Just got the new Black Keys album. I like having the album, guess I'm old fashioned. I also collect vinyl, just because it's cheap and abundant and sounds cool (the music, not the collecting).

jaywa · #4 05-20-2010, 11:44 AM

Well for one thing, the U.S. economy is bad and getting worse. Anyone with an ounce of financial perspective realizes that recorded music is a discretionary purchase -- not an essential -- and therefore is one of the first things they take out of their budget when money is tight.

Also, maybe people are realizing that a lot of the new recorded product out there just isn't that good.

kdel · #5 05-20-2010, 11:57 AM

While the economy is clearly part of the problem, sales have been falling consistently through the past decade, including when there was a booming economy. Rolling Stone had a good stark summary of things reviewing the past decade, which began with NSync shattering the one week sales record (2.4 million units!) and saw June 2009 have the entire top 200 albums of the month combined not matching that one week N Sync total. Illegal file sharing is the biggest culprit, but so is the outdated industry model itself, the ability to buy select songs instead of albums, the corporatization of radio, new small-scale direct sales paradigms, streaming and cable music offerings, the proliferation of free music online (MySpace, Youtube, others).

MNAirHead · #6 05-20-2010, 12:12 PM

We're turning to a 1 to 1 marketing world...

I say bring it on.. Ever since hearing a John and Yoko record I realized most are 2 singles with a bunch of horrid trash.

MNAirHead · #7 05-20-2010, 12:12 PM

guess we could fess up to how many here have at least one bootleg mp3

tycobb73 · #8 05-20-2010, 12:15 PM

With websites like pandora, etc I don't find the need to buy music anymore. If I do, I get em for 16 cents an mp3.

baalroo · #9 05-20-2010, 01:05 PM

Well, I always like to point out that a band that self produces and self distributes their album for $10 is going to make about $9 an album, as compared to the old model of making about $1 per album sold through the old methods of recording and distribution with the help of a label.

So, a band only needs to sell about 1/9th of the albums they used to sell to make the same amount of money as they used to 15 years ago. Which basically means even if album sales have dropped 80% (which I don't believe they have?), the equivalant band now to a band in the mid 90s are still making more money overall from album sales.

Chowowbus · #10 05-20-2010, 08:19 PM

With the double punch of a crap economy and no need for middlemen.......yah I can believe it!

+ 1 MNAirhead
I hope we are turning into a 1 to 1 marketing world.
I am tired of useless middlemen taking huge cuts for little work.

demon666 · #11 05-20-2010, 08:22 PM

If people put out good albums people will still buy them. I usually buy from small mom and pop places or from small distributors. The record companies have to realize **** in **** out.

KeithBMI · #12 05-20-2010, 09:18 PM

I don't buy albums, usually just 12" singles.

jerry · #13 05-20-2010, 10:19 PM

Buying at least a couple CDs or albums a week has been one of my little joys for over forty years, I don't think that will ever change for me.

pklima · #14 05-21-2010, 12:52 AM

Yeah, I had a couple of projects which recorded albums to release on Western labels and sell to fans in rich countries. Those are now finished because albums are so much harder to sell, especially at the obscure small-timer level where you now have to compete with a lot more bands (thanks to cheap recording, cheap instruments, cheap duplication and cheap distribution) - a lot of whom are willing to give everything away for free or sell albums for $3. I could still turn a profit but it'd be less every year, so I've gotten out of that business and am sticking to bands that focus on playing live and not on recording. I do still have one recording project (Goatbomb), but if that one never turns a profit it'll still be worth doing for other reasons.

Recordings nowadays are good to have as promotional material for your gigs and as a sort of status symbol - having a few albums out shows that you might be better than the bands who don't (though obviously rock/pop cover bands aren't really expected to have albums, for genres like jazz or folk and for originals bands it matters).

Personally I haven't bought anything on CD or vinyl in something like six years, and don't download music either. I either trade my own releases for stuff, or people just send it to me. I only buy music in sheet music form. It is a great time to be a consumer, though. There's so much more recorded music available out there than before, and you can get it cheap or free.

One more thought: I'm starting to see more and more labels offer bundles like CD + shirt + poster, I guess that's an indication that people will still buy shirts and other merch. Considering recordings a promotional expense and shirts and bracelets a core product will be a big blow to many bands' egos. I'm all for it.

djaydjay · #15 05-21-2010, 01:30 AM

This article doesn't give an view of the whole music industry.
I read a paper a few weeks ago. It was (if I remember right) over the last 10 years in Switzerland, and they gave a few really interesting point.

-cd sales did indeed drop by 45% (!), but live shows place sold increased by 33%, and the price of these live shows did increase too (but I can't remember for how much

I would say at least 20-30%)
-while sales dropped non-stop these last 10 years, 2000 was on of the highest point in music industry history. Taking this as your "reference" is completely biased.

I was really disapointed that they didn't speak about online sales. Of course it is not close to the cd loss, but it is slowly becoming a big part of musique sales.

I won't deny that music industry isn't at its highest point, but it defininitely isn't as bad as some compagny say.

pklima · #16 05-21-2010, 01:56 AM

That's what I suspect - music is still profitable, it's only the selling recordings part that's suffering.

What I'd really like to see is how sales of shirts and other merch are doing, but it's probably nearly impossible to get accurate numbers on that. I see some new bands coming out that will have a full lineup of merch and only one demo song recorded, and I wouldn't be surprised if this made perfect economic sense.