The music industry underestimated Taylor Swift

When people who work in the industry tell you how everything else has ruined their business, never forget the biggest problem is that they don't really know what they're doing.

Take how badly they misjudged Taylor Swift:

Just a couple weeks ago, industry sources were telling the music trade publication Billboard they expected Taylor Swift to sell about 750,000 copies of her new album, 1989, in its first week.

How good was that estimate?

Now, with 1989 out for just one day, Billboard says she’s likely to hit a million.

So, industry sources out by a quarter of a million copies.

To be fair to them, how could they be expected to know Taylor Swift was going to sell a million in a week? Nobody's done that since... erm, Taylor Swift did it with her last album. (Her album before that did a million, too.)

Music industry execs: they wouldn't even bother killing the goose that laid the golden egg, as they wouldn't even have realised it was laying golden eggs in the first place.

*insert usual disappointing NME sales headline here*

More gloom for the NME in the latest ABC figures, as sales of the print edition slide below 15,000. MediaGuardian reports:

Music magazine New Musical Express has suffered another slump in its print sales, falling more than a quarter to fewer than 15,000 in the first half of this year.

The 62-year-old IPC Media title had an average weekly sale of 14,312 in the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures published on Thursday, down 28.5% on the same period in 2013. Including digital sales, its circulation rose to 15,830.

The figure of just over 1,500 digital sales is probably the one piece of joy - fairly pitiful, but a massive improvement on the three figures they were reporting last time round.

But something has changed. The usual positive talk from the publishers has shifted direction:

Jo Smalley, publishing director of IPC’s music brands, said NME’s total reach across all platforms was now 3.6 million, “bigger than it has ever been” despite its decline in print. In its print heyday, the magazine sold more than 300,000.

Traffic on the NME mobile website grew 85% year on year, with nearly 40% of its total online audience now reading on mobile.

Smalley said: “We are also continuing to explore how NME can further expand its international footprint. This builds upon the launch of NME.com in India and Club NME in Brazil.

“These are just a few of many examples revealing how the NME business model is changing to pursue new opportunities and grow new revenues.”

Now, maybe MediaGuardian just chose to not report it, but it does sound somewhat like IPC is describing a world in which NME is not more than a magazine, but post-magazine. With the news today that Company is abandoning its print edition from next month, who would bet on a weekly, paper NME having that much of a future?

In other sales news, Q is down to just over 46,000; Kerrang also slumped by still manages over 33,000 copies a week (a resilience NME can only dream of); Uncut is down to 50,000; Mojo to 70,000.

We're putting our plans to run a kickstarter to buy and relaunch Sounds on permanent hiatus.

Hey Ho, Let's Go... eventually

It's taken the best part of forty years, but The Ramones' debut, Ramones, has finally gone gold in America.

The differential in sales between Ramones albums and Ramones tshirts is, perhaps, a question for another day.

Geri Halliwell: Who judges the judges?

It's been a while since we heard from Geri Halliwell, who older readers might remember used to be in the Spice Girls (or Little Mix: The Wilderness Years, as they're now known.)

She's been attempting to relaunch her career by following the Father, Dear Father model - once your popularity in the UK has waned, decamp to Australia and hope they haven't noticed.

So, how has it been going? Digital Spy... do you know?

'Half of Me' sold less than 400 copies in Australia, where Halliwell currently lives and works as a judge on Australia's Got Talent.

Oh.

(I think, if MIA feels her sales don't make her qualified to be called a pop star, Geri might have to consider what her job title would be.)

Awkwardly, Geri had been planning to do the single on Australia's Got Talent this week, but now she isn't:

"So for the final show of Australia's Got Talent – I asked myself what are my options? (They were expecting me to perform the new single) Could I still perform the song at #94? I could pretend it hasn't happened? Denial? Hide my disappointment? Unleash the fighter... Sing the song with 'magnificent' gusto doing my best to promote back it up the charts… Maybe I could get it to a respectful number '30'? Or even '60'?

"But is this me now? To keep pushing, so my pride wouldn't feel so hurt? Or maybe I admit this song just hasn't connected?"

Obviously you couldn't do the song, Geri - you'd become the first judge in talent show history to be voted off her own programme. Do a Spice Girls one. At least give the audience the chance to go "ohhhhhhh... that's who she was..."

Sky falls in as US digital sales drop for first time in recorded history

Every on the deck! Nielsen are reporting that the number of digital downloads sold in the US are falling:

For the year to date as of June 30, digital track sales have declined 2.3% to 682.2 million units from the 698 million units that tracks scanned in the first half of 2012, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

In the first quarter, track sales declined 1.34% to 356.5 million from the 361.3 million. In the second quarter the decline more than doubled to 3.3%, with track sales totaling 325.7 million units this year versus 336.7 million in the second quarter of 2012.

Hang about, hang about, put away your Lars Ulrich Was Right t-shirts, and take a breath.

First of, downloads are now competing for attention with streaming, which is going to have an impact.

But there's more than simply a drift to Spotify here - as Billboard explains:

Getting back to the softness in tracks, the decline can be attributed to a 20 million unit decrease in catalog sales, which at the mid-year point fell to 366.7 million units from the 386.9 million units that were scanned at the mid-year 2012. Meanwhile, current track sales grew slightly to 315.5 million from 311 million units.

So, as we saw with CDs, there comes a point when the mass rush to buy music already owned on a different format starts to fall away. That new songs are still selling well is pretty good news.

And there's... something else:

But with the decline in catalog sales, it’s more likely that the decline is due to the growing popularity of complete my album features at download stores, and the possible repricing of catalog sales up to 99 cents and $1.29 price points from the 69 cent tracks that was rolled out to catalog song titles when iTunes first embraced variable pricing in 2009.

Shock! Digital music tracks respond to pricing changes according to very basic laws of supply and demand!

You may now put on your Alfred Marshall Was Right t-shirts, and go about your business.

RIAA attempt to embrace Spotify

The decision by the RIAA to include streaming in gold and platinum certification is interesting, but not for the reasons the RIAA think.

Music Week explains how it'll work:

After a year-long project by the RIAA, the organisation will now recognise the non-sales format (in audio and/or video) for the first time ever in its 55-year history that will go towards amounts calculated for G&P’s Digital Single Award certification.

Within the new approach includes the formula of 100 streams being equivalent to one download.

Fifty-six certifications were given following the new rules for the Digital Single Award with 11 Gold, 18 Platinum and 27 multi-Platinum new 'combined' Digital Single Awards counting both downloads and streams.

This isn't really about legitimacy being given to streaming; it's more about the RIAA trying to carve itself out a role.

Did anyone have any problems with streaming not getting a randomly-assigned status from a self-appointed body before? The coverage of, say, Psy's massive YouTube numbers manages to survive quite well without the need to have Cary Sherman shout "that's equivalent to a platinum-studded-with-emerald disc, that is" over the top of the numbers. The metrics are all out in the open; why do we need a third party to use a periodic-table-based code to try and teach us that a million is a lot?

There's an added complication; historically, the silver, gold and platinum statuses have been conferred on shipments, rather than sales; wholesale orders rather than retail purchases. These digital prizes, though, are triggered by consumer behaviour.

While that's understandable - something on YouTube effectively has 'shipped' forty quintrillion plays - it's not comparing like with like, is it?

Music industry orders a very small cake and a tiny glass of sherry to celebrate

It feels like I've been doing this blog for ages - mainly because I have - and not once in all the time I've been writing has the music industry ever experienced a growth in sales.

It hasn't, in fact, since 1999.

2012, then, was a transformative year.

Sure, it was only a 0.3% growth in sales, but when your business has shrunk every year this century, that's what good news looks like.

Gordon in the morning: Million seller

Despite all the jokes about 'who he?' and 'no, really, which one was he again?', Gordon reports this morning that James Arthur has managed to sell a million copies of Impossible.

The X Factor winner. No, you remember.

So, that's a sign of a strong future career rather than a quick return to the milk round. (I always assume anyone who does well on the X Factor used to be a milkman.) Right?

Maybe not... only three other X Factor finalists have broken the million mark with their prize-winning single. Alex Burke - whose career has more or less judder to a halt; Matt Cardle and Shayne Ward.

If I were James Arthur... well, I'd have gone on Pointless instead of the X Factor in the first place, but if I leaped into James Arthur, Sam Beckett style, right now, I'd be keeping my options open down the dairy.

When is a surge not a surge?

The NME breathlessly runs up with the news that homophobia pays:

The ongoing fued between Azealia Banks and Angel Haze – which then became a row with Perez Hilton – over the weekend has sparked a sales surge for Banks.

Really? Has she sold double the number of records? Treble?

Er, no:

According to Billboard, Banks' '1991' EP saw a sales increase of 18 per cent over the last week, which equates to around 1000 copies sold in the US.

That's not an extra 1000 sales, it's a rise to 1,000 sales. Roughly 200 more CDs across the whole of the US. Compared with a week when there was a national holiday.

But what of downloads?

Sales of her single '212' rose by 3 per cent to 3,000 downloads.

So that's fewer than 100 extra sales.

So the "sales surge" turns out to be 300 extra sales in a nation of over 300 million.

"Tiresome spat doesn't inhibit minor uptick in sales" doesn't have quite the same grab to it, does it?

Cassingles: They're growing in popularity

Good news for manufacturers of pencils, although only the hexagonal sort. Britain is going to be needing something to start trying to spool unruly tape back into cassettes, as Cassingles had a massive upswing in sales in 2012. A 300% increase, in fact.

Although the Official Charts Company has a slight note of caution:

That’s right, the Official Charts Company track sales of recorded music in the UK seven days a week, 365 days a year, covering a whopping 99% of the singles market, EVEN CASSETTES! And now, according to this eye-popping treasure trove of data collected daily from music retailers the length and breadth of the country, we can confirm that the market for cassette singles, or ‘cassingles’ tripled in 2012, from 218 to a grand total of 604 copies.

480 of those cassingles were Feeder's Borders.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Chart people counted 270 albums on minidisc being sold in the UK.

No word on how the few remaining available Digital Compact Cassettes are selling, although "they're not" is most likely.

Gordon in the morning: Lady Boss demoted

Gordon is trying to not look too thrilled at early indications that Tulisa's album isn't selling well:

THE early signs aren’t good for TULISA’s debut solo album.

Despite a primetime promotional slot on The X Factor on Sunday, The Female Boss started yesterday at No27 on the iTunes chart.

It later crept up to No22 – behind KELLY CLARKSON, KE$HA and even JOOLS HOLLAND.

At the moment, it's 122nd in the Amazon chart (and 130th in the MP3 chart.)

Given that No Doubt's single crashed and burned after they appeared on X Factor, it's like this series is exhibiting an anti-Midas touch...

No Doubt; No sale

No Doubt aren't having much luck with Looking Hot. First, they blunder with an insensitive video which had to be pulled almost as soon as it was released.

Now, it turns out they only managed to sell 680 copies of the record in the UK, which even in these days isn't enough to scrape into the Top 200.

What if you returned from hiatus and nobody noticed?

Rihanna reaches number one. Actually, she's sold a few more copies than that.

A notable week this week, as Rihanna claims a record she'd probably rather not have: The first album to reach number one in the UK with sales below 10,000 copies.

Rather than wonder if their pricing and product is correct, the record labels want to simply fudge the way the chart works to stop it being embarrassing when Rihanna is compared with, say, Ed Sheeran's sales:

But with streaming services like Spotify luring digital buyers from iTunes, record companies believe that album “plays” should be included in the charts.

How would that work, actually? There was a statistic a while back which suggested the average number of plays for each CD purchased in the US was less than one, which would suggest that the 9,000-odd physical sales should count as something less than that if plays were being considered, which doesn't make sense.

How about accepting that the album was never anything more than a side-effect of how much you could fit on a disc, and perhaps dropping the album chart altogether? Add those 9,000 sales to the single sales for each of the individual tracks?

Gordon in the morning: Pop acts sell more than indie acts shocker

Yes, it's an absolute shock. Not that One Direction sell lots more records than less popular bands, but that Gordon Smart thinks it's surprising enough to make a news story:

If you add up the album, DVD and single sales of all the best bands in the country they don’t come close to One D’s sales.

Arctic Monkeys, Mumford & Sons, Kasabian, Maccabees, Vaccines and Noel Gallagher’s combined sales still fall short of the wee rascals’ latest achievement.

I'm not quite sure why Gordon chosen to group that lot together to represent "all the best bands in the country".

I'm picturing Gordon, calculator in hand, adding in the sales from another band that he has listed on his "authentic band" post-it note, waiting for it to tip over the 13 million combined sales claimed by One Direction. Like some sort of numerical, Beatle-haircutted version of Buckaroo.

For HMV, it's Midnight at the Apollo

HMV have sold the Hammersmith Apollo to the operator of the Millennium Dome for £32million.

It's the first step in HMV exiting the live music market that it was never entirely clear why it was in in the first place.

HMV confirms a miserable Christmas

HMV needed a good Christmas, or at least nothing worse than a mildly bad one. Santa didn't turn up.

Like-for-like sales were down 8.1% in the five weeks to the end of 2011. Unfortunately, given that they closed all those stores, this means actual total sales were down 16.6%.

Trying to find something positive to say, the former record shop chain offer that this is a "slowing" of the decline of the business. But presumably that's because there's not much left to fall away.

BPI almost sound upbeat; fall back on to wailing about piracy

Half a point for making the effort to the BPI for trying to make their New Year press release about 2011 sales sound slightly upbeat:

MUSIC SALES SLIP IN 2011 BUT DIGITAL SINGLES AND ALBUMS GROW STRONGLY

In the past, that headline would have been written the other way round, splattering the silver lining with the mud of despondency.

Does this mean the BPI is slowly coming to terms with the new world; accepting that they're lucky to have emerged out of the last ten years with any sort of business at all?

Nope. Much of the press release is given to the usual wailing about the nasty pirates. Chief Executive Geoff Taylor starts it off:

“British artists continue to produce incredible music that resonates at home and around the world. But while other countries take positive steps to protect their creative sector, our Government is taking too long to act on piracy, while weakening copyright to the benefit of US tech giants. The UK has already fallen behind Germany as a music market. Unless decisive action is taken in 2012, investment in music could fall again – a creative crunch that will destroy jobs and mean the next Adele may not get her chance to shine on the world stage.

Yes, god forbid that the government doesn't do as the BPI orders, lest the music industry lose out to American owned tech companies. Which would be a tragedy for the Japanese and American owned music industry, of course.

Taylor isn't an idiot, and he knows that it's probable that Germany's music industry has benefited not from any magic measures against piracy - "ooh, those umlauts are too hard to force through a torrent filter" - but from having had (for much of 2011) a stronger economy. Germany is a larger economy; it's got lower unemployment and lower inflation and the average German earns more than the average Brit - surely its surprising that it took so long for the UK to fall behind Germany in terms of music purchases? Taylor isn't an idiot. So why does he allow a news release to be circulated that makes him sound like one?

Tony Wadsworth, who chairs the BPI, also has something to say. The second paragraph of his thoughts at this magic time of year focuses on piracy:

“Led by Adele, Jessie J, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and others, records by British artists in 2011 achieved both critical and commercial success both at home and around the world. But the challenge of sustaining this performance against a backdrop of chronic piracy means that Government action remains absolutely crucial for British artists and their labels.”

Adele again. In fact, Adele had the whole of Tony's first paragraph just dedicated to her success:

“The spine-tingling performance by Adele at The BRIT Awards 2011 fired the starting gun on her incredible and well-deserved year of success. Her achievements are phenomenal – the biggest-selling album this century, the best seller of 2011 by miles, her debut album also making the year-end top five, not to mention her fantastic success overseas

As the press release points out, Adele's sales aren't just the impressive for this one-eighth of a century; they're just impressive, full stop:

Adele’s 21 reaches 3.8m sales – the biggest-ever selling album in a single year.

Unfortunately, this does tend to fire a big hole in the heart of Geoff and Tony's demand that something must be done about piracy to save the music industry. Despite all this "chronic" piracy going on, Adele's album has sold more copies in a year than any album has ever sold. More than a Michael Jackson album managed in a year, even the good one. More than a Beatles album ever managed to whisk out the shops in twelve months. More, even, than the third Charlatans album sold in a year.

So, how come Adele's album was not only immune to the chronic piracy, but thrived in a world so stricken? Had there been secret umlauts sewn into the hemlines of the choruses, rendering it impossible to torrent?

Were any of the many pirate-busting measures deployed? Did the pre-release circulate solely on a tape glued into a Walkman? Was every copy watermarked? Did a fleet of fake files get launched onto the internet to foil downloaders? Did Derren Brown hypnotise the world so that if they typed 'Adele 21 free' into Google they'd die?

Nope. The success of Adele's album seems to be nothing to do with avoiding piracy, and more to do with sticking out an album that people liked and wanted to buy.

Now, it's possible that in a world without torrentsearch, Adele might have sold more copies still of her record. But even so, she has sold more copies of 21 than any album has ever sold, even before home-taping killed music.

The conclusion has to be that if we don't see other records selling in large numbers, it's not because of chronic piracy, but chronic releases.

Look at the other names Wadsworth throws around - Jessie J, who is alright in a Nookie Bear Sings The Black Eyed Peas way; Coldplay, an act who can't even hide their own boredom with their music most days; Ed Sheeran, a singer so devoid of charisma promoters regularly close down his live act mid-set because they simply don't notice he's on stage. And these are the acts that Wadsworth picks out as the marshmallows in the box of Lucky Charms.

Since they're bobbing about on a sea of singing squadie spouses and ten year's worth of build-up of Cowell dung, you can see why Wadsworth felt that was the best he could do. There's people who will always be excited by music, but for big sales you need to get that ripple of connection, of interest, beyond those people and out into the wider public. The people who will buy an album from time-to-time, if it's a better way of spending their money than a computer game, or a bottle of wine, or a chip supper. With the best will in the world, Olly Murs is never going to win a struggle with a pickled egg and a can of Irn Bru.

It's not piracy. There's no need for the government to legislate. Unless the action they take is to pass a law forcing major labels to introduce quality control.

NME plummets again

Latest music magazine circulation figures are in, and - once again - they're grim for the NME, down below 30,000.

Here's the list, with change compared to the same period last year:

The Fly: 100,386 ; -7.2%
Kerrang! : 43,033 ; -2.2%
Mojo : 87,262 ; -4.8%
New Musical Express : 29,020 ; -14.3%
Q : 80,418 ; -10.1%
Top of the Pops : 98,030 ; -6.4%
Uncut : 66,004 ; -10.9%

In sheer number terms, the falling away of Q's audience is noteworthy, too. But look at the gap Kerrang has opened up over the NME (or, more accurately, has managed to hold onto) - K! now selling 50% more than the once impregnable NME. Putting on new readers would be a big ask, but surely something must be possible to quell the vanishing audience?

US album sales do something unusual

It hasn't happened since 2004: There's been a small increase in album sales in the US. The Telegraph reports:

According to data released Wednesday by tracking firm Nielsen SoundScan, overall album sales rose 3.6 percent to 221.5 million units during the first half of 2011, the first increase since 2004.

While it is too early to judge if the trend will last through the year, an annual increase would be only the second in 11 years.

It's bittersweet. Naturally, it's bittersweet. The rise in sales is down almost entirely to GaGa and Adele, and not only isn't there much hope there might be a couple of similar albums to help with the back end of the year, but even GaGa's album sales were a bit underwhelming.

So, yes, better than last year. But all those years of decline, it's a pause, not a comeback.

Worth noting, though, that what helped sales was releasing records people want to buy. Not throwing people in prison, or closing down websites, or educational videos, or telling people they're stealing.

The billion-pound download

Music downloads are now, officially, a billion pound industry - whatever that really means - in the UK, as the BPI releases the latest bunch of sales figures, and tots up the figures since 2004:

The BPI said that spending on digital albums grew 23% to £146m, more than 56.5m digital albums sold since the format launched in 2006.
A total of £132m was spent on digital singles, a 12% year-on-year increase, with almost 600m sold since 2004.

That might be pretty encouraging for those in the music industry who cling, doggedly, to the album format as - as far as my maths goes at this time in the morning - it looks like revenue from albums has overtaken singles this year. The smart money, though, is surely still in making songs rather than forcing people to buy multipacks.