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CD Sales: How Low Can They Go?

In the morass of press releases I received yesterday, one stood out for an absurd-on-first-glance claim inside: “PAPA ROACH: RECESSION PROOF!” it said, heralding the fact that the Al Shipley-beloved band had sold 44,456 copies of its new album Metamorphosis in that record’s first week in stories. Which was enough to land it at No. 8. Normally I would have rolled my eyes at such puffery, but a stat that appeared in Hits on Wednesday was enough to make me think that the press release had a point:

Q1 FUN FACT: We’d like to tell you the following is an April Fool’s joke, but it’s not. According to HITS’ numbers-crunching division (OK, it’s one guy with an abacus) , a less-than-grand total of 39 Q1 releases debuted north of 25k, and no album released during the quarter has yet hit the million mark in year-to-date sales. (4/1a)

And here are a few more fun facts for you:
• The best-selling album to come out in 2009, U2’s No Line On The Horizon, is at the 744,000-sold mark in four weeks out.
• The album right above it on this week’s SoundScan charts, Kelly Clarkson’s All I Ever Wanted, has been out for a week less, and hasn’t broken 400,000 yet.
• Martina McBride’s first-week sales on her album Shine—which debuted at No. 10 this week with 41,000 sales—were 71% lower than the opening-week sales of her last album, which came out in 2007. And that was with two American Idol contestants singing songs of hers in recent weeks!

And so on. So, will an album go platinum this year? My gut says that the U2 album will; there is, after all, a lot of year left. But any others… well, that’s up for debate. And more importantly, what do the album charts even mean in this ? I’ve refrained from writing the old “Who Charted” column because I just feel like the old metrics don’t apply… but I don’t know what does yet. A combination of album sales and streaming stats and touring and merch? (Are there even charts for merch, or is the old-school secrecy of record labels still ruling supreme there?) What about file-sharing? Are the dropping sales for music and the decimation of places to actually buy music engaged in an endless chicken-and-egg scenario? And am I outing myself as An Old (or at least A Relatively Old) by even caring about sales at this point?

Rumor Mill [Hits]

 
By Maura at 5:00 AM on Fri Apr 3 2009
Posted to: , , ,
  • Lax Danja House

    Ireland's population is just over 4 million, but yeah I was estimating the US population to be 400 million when it is in fact closer to 300. And my sums were still wrong. But I mean 6-7 million in the space of a year is still unheard of in the US in recent years as far as I know.

  • Anonymous

    i'm embarrassed to admit that i dug that first single of theirs enough to shell out for the album it appeared on.

  • Cam/ron

    Papa Roach: making California Central Valley rock look awful since 2000.

  • Al Shipley

    man it took less than a week for Maura to throw me under the Papa Roach bus!

  • RGve

    I think that last number is a bit off - Ireland's population is 5.8m, so it's the equivalent of nearer 5m in sales... Still a big number, but not quite diamond. NZ (pop 4.28m) had a local album by a kinda av group named Fat Freddy's Drop sell 105k recently, which works out at 7.5m when adjusted for population. I think the US's home market is suffering worse than anyone, here local artists still seem to get reasonable sales out of a sense of loyalty that doesn't exist towards Flo-Rida, for whatever reason.

  • Rock You Like An Iracane

    @DocStrange: PLEASE let the Arctics hit #1.


    You buy one, I'll buy one, and Domino can buy the other 100K.

  • Lax Danja House

    I was reading some interesting statistics yesterday as part of a research project. Snow Patrol's Eyes Open sold a total of around 90,000 copies in Ireland in its first few months, the most of any album in the country at that point. That number struck me as very low, until I adjusted for population and realised it's the equivalent of about 10 million in the US. When was the last time a record sold 10m in the States?

  • ObtuseIntolerant

    I'm going to cross my fingers that the Jonas Brothers can pull it off at a decent clip again but eh...who knows? It's an album within 10 months of the last and things are worse out there. Dicey. :)

  • DocStrange

    Maybe this means that indie albums will actually make an even bigger splash due to fans of that genre's preference of physical genres. We've seen this happen with big debuts from Arcade Fire and the Shins in the past. Maybe Phoenix or Arctic Monkeys pull a #1 this year in retail sales.

  • Anonymous

    @moomintroll: life keeps getting stranger and stranger doesn't it?

  • Anonymous

    First the possible return Limp Bizkit, and now interscope is forcing me to remember Papa Roach. Man that's annoying.

  • moomintroll

    @MhS: looks like about 44,456 people do.

    @Chris Molanphy: thanks for clarifying, I agree with Maura, it seems as if the rules for album chart calculations have become so convoluted since iTunes that they pretty much mean nothing now. It's really only showing the listening trends of a increasingly smaller section of the public.

  • Anonymous

    Maybe Green Day will go platinum this year?


    Also, I think there should be a weekly report on top torrent album downloads. That would be a lot of fun.

  • Chris Molanphy

    @moomintroll: First off, buying an album bundle at iTunes or Amazon counts toward the album chart.


    One of the biggest favors Apple did the record industry recently was the "Complete My Album" feature, which basically doesn't penalize the user for buying an advance single, by crediting that purchase toward an album bundle later. A "completed" album also counts toward the album chart. So it's a win-win for the label: they can push the leadoff single like crazy, then try to convert that user to buying the album later, with no downside for either themselves or the consumer.


    The problem, as you indicate, is that consumers don't seem to come back to buy the whole album, digitally or otherwise.

  • Anonymous

    I mean do people really buy Papa roach cds?

  • Chris N.

    Maybe a better metric would be some combo of albums sold + individual tracks sold.

  • Anonymous

    Papa Roach, hahaha

  • moomintroll

    @Chris Molanphy:hmm maybe that's the issue? With iTunes and Amazon it's even easier to just buy a few tracks from an album and not the entire album. How do they calculate that? Do they count it if you buy more than two of the tracks on an album or do you have to download the whole thing for it to be counted in the album charts? I know that people bought CD singles in the past, but now you can pick almost any album track, and just get a few. Oh wow, do you think this spells the end for b-sides too? I used to buy CD singles just to get the b-sides, but with the ability to just get the one song you want, are bands even making b-sides?

  • Chris Molanphy

    Can't believe you resisted the temptation to point out that Flo Rida's sophomore album, R.O.O.T.S. -- the one that Atlantic swears is going to make him "an album artist" -- is projected to debut next week with less than 50,000 in sales. That would be about one-thirteenth the first-week sales of "Right Round" at iTunes.

  • Anonymous

    is it just me or are these blogs becoming more depressing and more depressing as time goes? all this recession talk, I need to stay positive godamnit!

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