So, last week’s 79% drop in sales (261,000 to 57,000) for Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy seems like kinda-bad news for Axl Rose, Best Buy, and anyone who was hoping that gobs of free press and a long-awaited record would add up to sales, no? Well, Bob Chiappardi, a marketing consultant who claims to be one of the few people who’s worked with GNR since the Live?! Like A Suicide days, thinks that the album’s best days are actually ahead of it! Chiappardi believes that Chinese Democracy is going to be a slow-burning hit like Kid Rock’s Rock N’ Roll Jesus, which overcame sorta-soft initial sales to move 2.5 million copies. Reason 1? He just serviced Chinese Democracy to strip clubs! But I’m not so sure about Axl’s long-awaited opus overcoming its Thanksgiving-turkey status anytime soon.
1. Chinese Democracy doesn’t really have an “All Summer Long”-style barnburner. The song that sent Rock N’ Roll Jesus to its perch in the album chart’s upper echelons was seemingly crafted in a lab: a little bit of Skynyrd, a little bit of Zevon, a whole lot of heartstring-plucking via longing lyrics about the good old days. Chinese Democracy’s most prominent nostalgia-stoking comes from listeners wondering what the album would have sounded like if Izzy hadn’t left the band.
2. Even if some song struck a chord, switching up the album’s iTunes strategy now would work about as well as it did for Estelle last spring. And that’s in part because…
3. The Best Buy deal was pretty much a bust. I think we can all agree on this, yes? Lousy in-store promotion (the lack of Midnight Madness sales should have been a key here, since freaking Guitar Hero World Tour rated one at the Best Buy near me but this supposedly much-awaited album didn’t), no “special” sections a la Wal-Mart’s AC/DC ministore, the album’s piddling displays being overshadowed by the box set of The Sopranos: They all add up to a release date that seemed to have been anticipated mainly because then everyone could put it behind them.
4. The album’s sales don’t really matter in the long run to Axl, or his label. The Best Buy deal resulted in many interested parties getting cash up-front; the big blue retailer is probably spending any music-related meetings it’s currently holding trying to figure out how to further cut floor space before the bottom completely falls out of the record biz. And besides…
5. Sure, maybe some chick will come up with a great routine to “Rhiad And The Bedouins” someday, but strip clubs aren’t exactly recession-proof. Just look at what happened to Scores, which went from bringing in $400,000 a night to shutting down because of money problems. There’s a “trickle-down” joke to be made here, but I’m about to eat lunch, so I’ll refrain.
Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy nosedives on the charts [musicradar]
And still no official online shop…
You could have stopped at number 1. The lack of memorable songs is the main reason this album won’t do much. I previewed this and heard 2 songs that I would want to hear again, but a week later, I don’t remember the titles or melodies, so it’s a forgettable collection of tunes. GNR was great back in the day, but, it’s damn near impossible to follow up, and or measure up to Appetite for Destruction.
As far as the strip clubs go, you gotta get spins just like radio, and if the dancers don’t care to dance to it, it’s a hard sell.
Darling don’t refrain!
I think you hit the nail on the head at number 4!
The “band,” the label, and the management knew that the way to make money off of this thing was during the anticipation phase and man did they make a royal killing. Universal knew that anyone who wanted the album badly enough had had acces to it for months.
So they decided to sell the thing to Best Buy and Myspace instead of to consumers which was probably about the best move they could’ve given the circumstances. S
ure it would have worked better at Wal Mart (or even Crate and Barrel for that matter) than at BB - but it looks like they went for the best deal they could get.
The money they got upfront from Best Buy (their president, I believe, mentioned something along the lines of it being the biggest deal ever of its kind - which would indicate north of 30 million) and Myspace (which I’m sure paid dearly for the chance at those 8 million pre-release listens means that it had already generated enough revenue even pre-release to more than satisfy The Big U.
After that, the album is solid enough to become at very least a cult classic given Guns’ prowess as catalogue behemoths so it outta keep right on moving units pretty steadily under the radar for some time to come.
Definitely no ALL SUMMER LONG or NOVEMBER RAIN here but it’s just as likely as not that any of the several radio friendly tracks could catch fire at rock radio at some point.
And it’s also not entirely plausible that we could see one of those high-concept GNR is known for at some point (esp. given Iovine’s stated belief that MV’s are one of UMG’s great untapped revenue streams…
The biggest mystery to me is: WHY would BB pay all of this money for all of these copies (assuming that’s how the deal was structured) just to let them gather dust.
Is some one at Best Buy fuzzy on the particulars of loss leading or are they perhaps operating under the popular premise that most men wait until the last minute to holiday shop for the strippers in their lives? Time will tell…
@porkchops:
I was in a BB this weekend-they had piles of CDs & LPs gathering dust…