Everyone knows this, when an album or a single has sold a certain amount of copies, it turns Gold (500,000), Platinum (1,000,000) or Diamond (10,000,000), and this is obviously the goal of most artists. However, Forbes reports that, this year, not a single artist’s album has gone platinum, and the year is almost over! Really? Not even Beyoncé or someone in her league? According to Forbes, we are far from the million, even for the heavy weights, as Beyonce’s self titled album has sold around 750,000 copies … Wikipedia says the album has sold more than 2 million copies, but because it was release in 2013 and so the 750,000 copies apply to the sales for this year only.
Actually, there is one album which has sold over 1,000,000 copies (3.2 million so far) and this is ‘Frozen’, but it is a soundtrack and it doesn’t really represent one unique artist! This is telling a lot about the shape of the music industry,… we have said it many times before, people don’t buy music anymore!
And what about the singles? 60 songs have sold around one million this year, whereas it happened for 83 songs last year… and in this case we are necessarily talking about people buying a song as a digital download not in its physical form.
Billboard had an interesting article comparing the sales of 10 best-selling albums of the first eight months of 1994 with those of 2014 and it is very revealing: If the numbers ones (Frozen’s soundtrack and Ace of Base’s ‘The Sign’) are not very far away from each other at 3,050,000 versus 3,808,000, the sales for other artists that we consider huge now tell a disastrous story: At number 2 in 2014, Beyonce’s self titled, with 771,000 copies sold versus Counting Crows’ ‘August & Everything After’, with 2,917,000 copies sold in 1994! At number 3, Lorde’s ‘Pure Heroine’ with 741,000 versus The Lion King’s Soundtrack with 2,893,000! At Number 4 ,Eric Church’s ‘Outsiders’ with 708,000 versus Mariah Carey’s ‘Music Box’ with 2,295,000, and it goes on and on… 500,000-700,000 (Sam Smith’ ‘In the Lonely Hour’ and Pharrell’s ‘GIRL’ only sold respectively 552,000 and 516,000 copies) seems to be the range these days, whereas the same category of popular artists were selling 2 million copies a decade ago.
Sure, streaming is to blame more than piracy, as there are so many options to listen to music now, that a comparison with 1994 is not even relevant, Spotify, YouTube, Bandcamp, Internet radios are kings….. Plus, are pirate sites still regarded as pirate sites now that they are allowed to legally release Thom Yorke’s new album? Also, and I am going to sound old, how many artists out there are worth your money? Can you think about one who is going to last as long as the Beatles or the Stones? There is still some good music out there, you have to look for it, but we have created a society where there is so much music to consume, good or bad, where people’s attention span is getting shorter at every minute (due to the internet and other electronic devises) that nothing lasts very long anymore, nothing perdures and the market has adapted to this. I believe none of the music we consume in big amount right now will be relevant in 20 years or so, so why buying it, why bothers? I still occasionally buy an album when it matters to me, but I am old and this represents a tiny portion of the music out there… The albums I buy are certainly not going platinum tomorrow, they are not mainstream since, as Iggy Pop said in his John Peel Lecture, ‘almost all the best music is coming out on indies today’.
Of course U2’s last move did not change anything in the situation, as they delivered the album for free in everyone’s iTunes library… but of course Iman’s favorite, Taylor Swift will save us, as ‘1989’ is about to drop in a week. I know she can do it, aha can sell more than a million copies of her new album during what’s left of 2014, even though she is cheating with diet coke and kittens.
