The Wisdom of the Illiterati


	missing the boat Chris Molanphy has an interesting post up on Idolator about Atlantic Records' bizarre decision to pull Estelle's album, Shine, off of iTunes just as "American Boy" was about to crack the top ten. The idea, obviously enough, is to try and pull off the same trick that Kid Rock has managed with his album Rock n Roll Jesus and the hit single "All Summer Long": forcing people who want the single to buy the album by refusing to make the single available any other way. Chris hits all the important points, and his history of the decline of the single through the 90s is fascinating, but there's also a note of paranoia that I don't think is justified. It isn't that I don't believe the major labels would love to kill the single, and iTunes in the process, if they could manage it, it's that the ship has already sailed, and they have no chance now of stopping it. Kid Rock's success with "All Summer Long" is a fluke: an established artist playing to the nostalgia of his core audience in as obvious and abject a manner as he can manage, while at the same time striking a hypocritical no-downloading stance that he tries to make sound like a way of standing up for the little guy when what he's really doing is fleecing him. Meanwhile, the market as a whole moves more and more toward downloading, and even if Apple continues to refuse to sell LPs as complete units instead of individual tracks, stories like Kid Rock's are going to be rare. You can't blame Atlantic for trying the same tactic with Estelle, but she's a totally different case: a British hip-hop singer with no US fan base, whose single has been slowly building for over three months now and was finally poised to make the top ten (she wouldn't have made it this week, though, not with T.I. and P!nk leaping in ahead of her). But, thanks to Atlantic, she's now barely in the top forty, her album sales have dropped, and her radio airplay has stalled. Atlantic claims that they're doing this based on their reading of the audience, but treating Estelle's audience the same way as Kid Rock's shows how little they know about either. They're also disregarding the fact that the audience's buying habits are rapidly mutating. A year ago, when Billboard changed the formula they used to calculate the Hot 100, it seemed as if they'd created a bulwark against digital sales making the singles chart look like a free-for-all. Since then, though, digital has grown so much that records are once again bouncing up and down like ping-pong balls (the Ting Tings "Shut Up and Let Me Go" has dropped out and re-entered the Hot 100 so many times I've lost count). Kid Rock and Atlantic can brag as much as they want about his CD selling a hundred thousand copies a week, but the fact is that three or four years ago, a hit like this would have had him selling twice that number, and airplay alone would have put his single in the top ten. Record company machinations, especially such bald money grabs as this, are always to be deplored, but it's obvious, for now at least, that history is not on the major label's side. Instead of adapting themselves to the new environment, they're trying to rig the game. The odd thing is that they're doing it right out in the open, where everybody can see them cheating. If they're that desperate, you know they've already lost. \| [Archives] Search entries:		top ten 1966 top ten OTHER OCCASIONAL RAMBLINGS Hail Blogoslavia! ~~100~~ 45 or so things about JSM The Saga of the Lone Biscuit OTHER BLOGS Blogroll Me

missing the boat

Chris Molanphy has an interesting post up on Idolator about Atlantic Records' bizarre decision to pull Estelle's album, Shine, off of iTunes just as "American Boy" was about to crack the top ten. The idea, obviously enough, is to try and pull off the same trick that Kid Rock has managed with his album Rock n Roll Jesus and the hit single "All Summer Long": forcing people who want the single to buy the album by refusing to make the single available any other way.

Chris hits all the important points, and his history of the decline of the single through the 90s is fascinating, but there's also a note of paranoia that I don't think is justified. It isn't that I don't believe the major labels would love to kill the single, and iTunes in the process, if they could manage it, it's that the ship has already sailed, and they have no chance now of stopping it. Kid Rock's success with "All Summer Long" is a fluke: an established artist playing to the nostalgia of his core audience in as obvious and abject a manner as he can manage, while at the same time striking a hypocritical no-downloading stance that he tries to make sound like a way of standing up for the little guy when what he's really doing is fleecing him.

Meanwhile, the market as a whole moves more and more toward downloading, and even if Apple continues to refuse to sell LPs as complete units instead of individual tracks, stories like Kid Rock's are going to be rare. You can't blame Atlantic for trying the same tactic with Estelle, but she's a totally different case: a British hip-hop singer with no US fan base, whose single has been slowly building for over three months now and was finally poised to make the top ten (she wouldn't have made it this week, though, not with T.I. and P!nk leaping in ahead of her). But, thanks to Atlantic, she's now barely in the top forty, her album sales have dropped, and her radio airplay has stalled.

Atlantic claims that they're doing this based on their reading of the audience, but treating Estelle's audience the same way as Kid Rock's shows how little they know about either. They're also disregarding the fact that the audience's buying habits are rapidly mutating. A year ago, when Billboard changed the formula they used to calculate the Hot 100, it seemed as if they'd created a bulwark against digital sales making the singles chart look like a free-for-all. Since then, though, digital has grown so much that records are once again bouncing up and down like ping-pong balls (the Ting Tings "Shut Up and Let Me Go" has dropped out and re-entered the Hot 100 so many times I've lost count). Kid Rock and Atlantic can brag as much as they want about his CD selling a hundred thousand copies a week, but the fact is that three or four years ago, a hit like this would have had him selling twice that number, and airplay alone would have put his single in the top ten.

Record company machinations, especially such bald money grabs as this, are always to be deplored, but it's obvious, for now at least, that history is not on the major label's side. Instead of adapting themselves to the new environment, they're trying to rig the game. The odd thing is that they're doing it right out in the open, where everybody can see them cheating. If they're that desperate, you know they've already lost.