Album Sales Continue Downward Spiral
Billboard shares an analysis of the latest bad news on the music sales front. The highlights (low points?) include:
- Album sales were down 18.1% compared to last year, 31% compared to '07
- The July 5 week period 6/28 – 8/1 was down 10.3% compared to the same period in '08 and 22.8% vs. '07. Michael Jackson provided a sales bump that began with his death on June 25th.
- Year to date album sales are down 14.5% vs. '08 and 31.1% vs. '07.
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I just bought both of Ronald Jenkees’ CDs after seeing some of his videos on YouTube. Where were those counted in these statistics? Oh that’s right, they’re not, ‘cos Ronald sells direct from his own website, and guess what, he keeps selling out of CDs!
Is this really “Album Sales Continue Downward Spiral” or is it just “Sales via Majors Continues Downward Spiral While Direct Marketing Explodes”?
Amen!
Great point Sam. Just because the majors or online retailers are not getting a cut, doesn’t mean that CD sales are down. It could mean there not showing up on SoundScan. There’s got to be a better way to count CD sales. Another observation – when was the last time you saw any ads promoting CDs? CD retailers don’t have the internet dollars to advertise that iTunes and Amazon have.
I am so happy that people are becoming aware of the record labels’ decreasing power over the music industry. Thanks to the internet, the music industry game is now played at a level playing field. The majors no longer rule the roof. Independents are now making hay while the majors struggle to sell albums. This is good for everyone; an artist doesn’t need to have a record deal to make millions any more. All an artist has to do is create great music, develop a fan base, and sell song downloads to fans from his/her website. I love it!! There are sites where artist can accomplish that. http://www.mstardom.com or http://www.myspacestardom.com are good choices.
Y’know I’d been thinking of the whole Ronald Jenkees Vs Majors thing and I was wondering if there was any way to compare Ronald Jenkees popularity with an artist who is signed to a major. So I thought, well why not compare you tube views and subscriptions for their official you tube channels.
So I’ve just picked one of my current favourites Pendulum and loaded up their YouTube channel. Pendulum are on a Warner label. They have very good popularity in their genre as far as I can tell. One look at their live videos shows that they have a strong following.
Pendulum TV has 13,308 subscribers, the official video for Granite has 2.7 million views, the official video for Other Side has 987 thousand views, the next 3 are 299K, 276K and 230K views respectively.
Ronald Jenkees channel has 135,411 subscribers. His top 5 videos have 5 million, 3.3 mill, 3.1 mill, 2.7 mill and 2 million views respectively!
OMG!!! When I started writing this post, even I didn’t expect anything like that! What a star!
This is a guy who, as far as I know, and according to his You Tube profile, is an UNSIGNED ARTIST who has used only You Tube and his own website to promote himself.
When I ordered both of his CDs from his website the other day he was sold out, I just got an email today saying that CDs are back in stock and my order was being shipped.