A couple of weeks ago Billboard’s print edition ran a fascinating graph (for some reason it’s not in the online version of the article) charting sales of Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck [Forget] You” against its place on the Mainstream Top 40 radio chart. For the first couple of months radio play and sales ran pretty much in parallel, rising and falling together. But somewhere in its third month of release something strange happened: the song dropped off the airplay chart, and as soon as it did, shot up the digital chart, more than doubling its sales in two weeks. A few weeks later it reappeared on the airplay chart, where it’s been slowly rising ever since. But as airplay has risen, sales have dropped in almost exact inverse proportion to the song’s airplay ranking.
This may be a singular phenomenon (and the jump in sales may have been related to the song’s appearance on Glee), but it would be interesting to track other records and see if the same thing holds. It makes perfect sense, after all, that people would avoid buying a record as long as they can hear it on a regular basis on radio. I was reminded of this yesterday when I was reading Chris Molanphy’s presentation at this year’s EMP conference (I wasn’t able to go this year, but a PDF of Molanphy’s talk can be downloaded here). In it he discusses the way the major labels tried to kill the single in the ’90s by creating radio hits but refusing to release actual singles. Records would remain on the airplay charts for months at a time, quite possibly because it was the only inexpensive way for people to hear music they loved without paying an exorbitant price for it (not that the albums didn’t sell, but you have to wonder how many singles might have been sold if they had ever been released). The same phenomenon still exists, to some degree, on the Adult Contemporary Airplay chart, where records can remain in the top ten for months at a time while barely selling at all.
This has been said many times before, but people are always going to seek out the least expensive option of hearing something as ephemeral as pop music. It’s as if they already know that they’ll get tired of it soon enough, and don’t see the point in making a major investment. Maybe the labels’ problem is that they refuse to recognize the ephemerality of the music they’re making; they think they can sell it forever, even when most of the time they’re lucky to keep people interested for more than two months.
