According to the OC Weekly, a weird phenomenon happened in the record sales this year. 76.6 million of the albums that were sold during the first six months of 2012 were more than 18 months old, whereas only 73.9 million of them were current albums. Since we keep track of these things, this is apparently the first time that old records are outselling new records.
Nielsen analyst David Bakula explained:
‘That's a combination of two things: not having the big blockbuster new releases in the first half, and having very, very strong catalog,’
There still was the effect 'Adele 21', which sold a million more copies in 2012 than it had at this point in 2011. However, it was not enough to reverse the tendency, the strong catalog of oldies did outsell the new stuff.
And among the old top sellers, we find Guns N' Roses' 'Greatest Hits' (the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame effect?), several records by Whitney Houston (the death effect without any doubt) and various other ones which are sold almost for nothing (the price effect),… Amazon sent me an email a few days ago with tons of ‘old’ records to download for only $2.99, so I suppose this is a general tendency.
Sure new albums are always more expensive, around $10 for digital download, and $13-18 for physical sales…May be new CDs are too expensive after all? But how could artists hope to survive in these difficult times?
If I may add an important aspect of all this, it has everything to do with the age of people buying music, older people mostly buy old stuff, while younger people are interested by new stuff, and they simply don’t buy it when it is so easy to stream it or even steal it.