Since this seems to be the time of year to list all the “greats,” “tops ” and “bests” of last year, I thought it might be interesting to point briefly to Billboard magazine’s breakdown of the music numbers generated in 2013.
I do this because there was one item that stood out to me. According to numbers collected by Nielsen SoundScan, the biggest album last year was Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience. I’m sure that had the former ‘N Sync guy kickin’ up his heels with a Homer-like “Woohoo!” On the other hand, Justin’s winning album also happened to be the lowest-selling bestseller in the recorded history of bestsellers. D’oh!
Yep, that top-selling LP only eked out a mere 2.43 million copies sold—only the second album since 1991 to top the end-of-the-year chart with fewer than 3 million copies under its belt. And everybody else on the sales charts was way below that. When you consider the two previous years (both ruled by songstress Adele’s 21 with 4.41 million in 2012 and 5.82 million in 2011) that’s a pretty precipitous drop.
Of course, you can’t pin all the blame on JT, and I’m really not here to pooh-pooh his success. I just thought it interesting that the whole music industry has seemingly been on the fade for a while. Overall album sales dropped 8% last year, for instance. And that stat includes digital downloads, which dropped in 2013 from 117.68 million to 117.58 million—the first drop since Nielsen began tracking digital sales in 2003.
So what are we to make of this trend? Music still makes the world go round, right? People surely love their tunes today every bit as much as they did, say, 10, 20 or 100 years ago. So what’s the problem?
Well, a lot of people think it’s that relatively new convenience called music streaming that’s killin’ the sales numbers—those online anytime, anywhere music services offered through the likes of Spotify, Pandora and Apple’s new iTunes radio. And that could well be. Spotify, for instance, recently reported some impressive numbers, saying its listeners streamed 4.5 billion hours of music in 2013.
Can that be the new long-term model though? I mean, that suggests that the average consumer is willing to pay out their hard-earned green week-by-week and month-by-month for the very act of listening … rather than having something they actually own and listen to. In that setup, when you stop subscribing you lose everything. Can that really work?
A number of industry folks seem to be wondering about that, as well. Ted Cohen, a digital music consultant with the firm TAG Strategic said as much in a discussion of steaming in a slate.com article.
There is this irrational resistance for people to actually plunk down their credit card for streaming services. We’re 13 years into the Napster phenomenon of ‘music is free,’ and it’s hard to get people back into the idea that music is at least worth the value of a cup of Starbucks coffee a week.
When you look at it from that perspective, it’s possible that Cohen’s theory about the go-online-and-get-your-music-for-free mentality of the average consumer is what’s really shaking up the industry as a whole. Why spend anything at all if picking up your favs is as easy as flipping on your portable Internet-connected device and enduring a few seconds of commercials?
On the other hand, then you’ve got the Beyoncè model of bypassing everybody in the industry, putting out a homemade visual album with no advance advertisement and somehow sell millions of copies. So … who really knows what moves we, the fickle masses, anymore.
Hey, I remember the days of transistor radios and 99-cent 45s. Back when I was a kid I was subscribing to those penny-to-join record clubs and building my vinyl collection. And while I don’t have any of that anymore, I’m still as rabid a music fan as ever. So I can’t help but think that whatever happens, whatever the industry thumps, bumps, twists and turns, the beat will go on. And we’ll all just hold on and figure out a way to keep tapping in to those beautiful sounds.
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