As if to prove the point I was making last week, Coldplay does me the favor of debuting their new album at number one, while the title single, which was number one last week, drops to six. Katy Perry's taking number one in the same week her album debuted proves nothing either way--the single is still climbing on radio, and I suspect she would have hit number one anyway. As a debut artist (if you don't count her brief foray into contemporary Christian), people are probably more wary of putting money out for the album and are sticking to the known quantity until they get a chance to hear a few more tracks.
Meanwhile, there's another possible trend that suggests people are being more cautious in the way they're buying music, at least in terms of paying more than once for the same track. Last year, ten different artists had more than one single in the top ten. The year before, eleven. This year, so far, there have been three. More to the point, almost all of those previous multiple charting artists were pulling material from a single album--Fergie, Mariah Carey, Kelly Clarkson, Justin Timberlake. The labels squeezed those LPs until they bled.
This year, the three artists who have managed to make more than one appearance on the chart have done so either with material from different albums (Miley Cyrus), or with bonus cuts added to special editions of their previous LP (Chris Brown and Rihanna). In both Brown and Rihanna's case, those cuts were issued over a month before the special edition came out, making them essentially non-LP singles. Brown's "Forever" is especially illustrative. His next single was supposed to be another album track, "Take You Down", but a week after it debuted at a dismal 99, "Forever" was released on iTunes with little promotion and went straight into the top ten. "Take You Down" never cracked the top forty, and is now at 48 and dropping, while "Forever", though it fell out of the top ten for a while due to lack of airplay, is now at number seven and climbing while the album itself slowly moves down the chart.
This is all anecdotal, of course, and I'm not going to make any sweeping statements based on a handful of records (well, I'll try not to anyway), but it looks more and more as if the audience is adjusting to the digital era and turning it to their advantage far more quickly the than record labels are. I still won't vouch for their tastes, but they obviously know they've been getting the short end of the stick, and have become much more savvy in their buying habits--those who are still buying, that is, and not just downloading.
I haven't yet read your recent article in the Atlantic (it's so long!), but I understand you think that constant web surfing is turning people into attention deficient zombies who find it impossible to read anything longer than a paragraph.
I myself have been surfing the web, in it's various and everchanging guises, for well over fifteen years now, and, as you can see, maintain my own blog, the entries in which are rarely over a paragraph or two.
Over the last ten years, as my web browsing and blogging have continued to expand, I have also read, in addition to many other things, the complete fiction of Henry James, half the novels of Iris Murdoch, and, come the end of this month, the complete fiction of Fyodor Dostoesvsky in tandem with Joseph Franks' five-volume, 2300 page biography.
Up until a few months ago, there was along established phenomenom on the singles charts known as the "album bump". Singles by established artists, unsupported by a current album, would enter the charts, gain some radio airplay and some sales, settle into the mid-30s for a week or two, and then, when the album was released, suddenly leap into the top ten (Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" is a good example of this). It was as if a large part of the audience wasn't aware that the single could be purchased until the album came out. Singles that were already in, say, the top fifteen, would almost always jump to number one, and stay there as long as album sales and airplay were strong.
In the last few months, however, the album bump seems to have disappeared, at least for established artists. Mariah Carey, Usher, and Lil Wayne have all had number one singles this year, and all three had albums debut at number one, as well. But here's the odd thing: the week each album was released, the lead single either stayed stagnant, or actually dropped on the chart, and all these singles achieved their number one status before the album appeared. Lil Wayne sold over a million copies of Tha Carter III last week, the biggest week for any album since 2005, but this week, the lead single, "Lollipop", which has been number one for a month, inexplicably dropped to number three. Mariah Carey's "Touch My Body" also dropped the week of her album's release, while Usher's "Love in This Club" stood motionless the week his album came out, and slowly dropped in the weeks that followed.
As Antony Bruno points out in Billboard, it's been accepted wisdom at the major labels for a long time that pre-release singles hurt album sales (that was why Epic foolishly held back on releasing Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls"; it would have been number one for a full two months--instead of a paltry one week--if they'd released it before the album). Now it appears the exact opposite is the case. Once the album is out, the audience picks up the LP instead of the single, which, unless massive airplay holds it up, quickly drops down the chart. The artist, and the song, are no less popular, but the audience is going with the bargain bulk package instead of the higher priced individual unit.
This undercuts yet another piece of the record industry's accepted wisdom: that you could make the audience buy the same song dozens of times if you packaged it attractively enough. Now there is no package, and that trick is a lot harder, if not impossible to pull off. This, in turn, makes it difficult to peddle follow-up singles in any market other than radio. Mariah Carey's latest single, "Bye-Bye", which debuted the same week as the album, has barely made top 25 and shows no sign of going further, even though it's gotten plenty of airplay. In order to keep album sales up, artists are going to need to release more LPs, with fewer singles pulled from each one, a marketing scheme that takes us back to the mid-sixties, at least (this has been Def Jam's strategy for Rihanna, who's released three albums, and scored 9 top ten singles, in less than three years). The problem is that, ultimately, that isn't going to work either. Those 60s albums never sold very well, and besides, as long as iTunes refuses to sell albums as discrete, all-or-nothing units, no one would buy them (though they might pick up enough of the better cuts to get them onto the lower reaches of the charts). People might not even bother with that mightiest of all cash cows, the greatest hits set.
All of this, of course, is probably moot as long as filesharing exists (and predictions are that as time goes by, the filesharing situation is only going to get worse for the record companies). Although Lil Wayne has demonstrated that you can sell a million official releases by giving away a ton of unofficial ones first, that isn't an example that will work for everyone (just like the Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails and Coldplay models may only work with their particular audience). And when the audience essentially stops paying for music at all, it will hardly matter what sort of marketing scheme the labels come up with. The first person to invent a marketing plan that makes the record companies money and that works with more than one artist or genre will be hailed as a savior, but I'm willing to bet no such person exists. The record industry will eventually, I'm afraid, become the equivalent of online busking--"If you like our music, please buy a t-shirt or drop a few dimes in our Paypal account. Thank you."
Anthony Miccio and all the commenters at Idolator hate it, but fuck 'em, Feed the Animals is the most outrageously hilarious mash-up, break-in record I have ever heard. Haven't you always wanted to hear someone rap over "C'mon Eileen"?
I don't think much of the Ting Tings' first single, "Shut Up and Let Me Go", and the album is pretty ordinary, but "That's Not My Name", their current UK single, is the best dancey pop song I've heard all year. The video is great, but I recommend the LP version, which is a minute and half longer, adds yet another layer of vocals (and another layer of feelng), and just keeps building and building. A great record.
It's a stupid question, I know, considering how many bizarre names rock bands have adorned themselves with in the past, but I need to ask it anyway: what the hell kind of name for a band is Flyleaf? Flyleaf, in case you don't remember, is a publishers term for the blank sheets that appear at the beginning and end of books (I could tell you exactly why they're there, but I don't want to get too technical here). Does this mean that the band considers itself a blank page, a tabula rasa, or simply a leftover piece of a larger process (like a spandrel, to get even more esoteric)? Whatever the case, now that the example has been set, I'd like to suggest a few other names based on printing and publishing jargon, and the genre's they would best fit.
Saddle Stitch -- Country (duh) Dust Jacket -- Post-grunge (or whatever genre Nickelback and Daughtry fit into) Verso -- Minimalist Techno Hardback -- Metal Remaindered -- Emo Spiral Bound -- Shoegaze Perfect Bound -- Christian
This morning I had thought of ones for Disney pop-punk (i.e. The Jonas Bros) and goth, but somehow I've forgotten them already. Suggestions welcome, of course
