New Releases -- U.S.
(1992 to 2009)
What I saw in 2002 was that the RIAA was trying to create a self-fulfilling
prophesy. What if they moaned and cried about Napster and nothing really
happened. So they made sure sales would drop by simply putting out less
product. Then, in 2003 and 2004, they ramped back up a little and
sales actually came back in 2004. Seemed like simple cause and effect
at the time.
But what happened from 2005 to 2009? Releases went through the roof,
but sales didn't come with them. 
I'll leave you to ponder over that for a
minute. Now let's look at Canada, some Statscan data provided by Kent
Clark, a Loyal Reader from
the Great White North. 
The Canadian data is rather odd. It doesn't follow
the cause and effect model either.
Correction from previously stated assumption -- "Other" is
data from non-Canadian releases.
The Canadians slashed their new releases between 2003
and 2007, and sales actually went up. Maybe the Canadian branches
of the major labels actually got more efficient at connecting with
the audience. Maybe Nettwerk Records has a lot to do with it, too.
Here's the big difference between the U.S. and Canada:
When I started writing about the RIAA in 2002, nobody
had a clue who they were. I had to always explain it. Now, pretty
much every college student in the country knows all about them. I
don't have to explain it. The RIAA is the group of assholes that
sued 40,000 people for listening to music. And every year since they
really got going, sales have dropped by 15 to 20 percent. What a
big surprise.
Canadians haven't been sued. Yet. Nettwerk Records,
a Canada-based label, actually came out against the idea of suing
people, which is why I think that may have effected sales in a positive
manner.
There's still a cause and effect going on, but it's
based on knowledge, not numbers.
The thing is, all of this is such a miniscule part
of the actual music industry, especially in the United States. Nielsen
is considered to be the most reliable infor mation. It's what people
turn to when they want to find out what's happening as far as data
goes.
But Nielsen doesn't have half the story.
The Unreported Sales
If you add up all the available new release figure
from 1992 to 2009, you're going to come up with a total in the neighborhood
of 735,000 new releases.
Go take a look at CDBaby's
"About" page. According
to CDBaby, they are "the largest online distributor of
independent music." And they'll give you their numbers.
278,510 albums being sold on CD Baby
5,339,025 CDs sold online to customers
$107,769,092 paid directly to the artists
The stat there that I'm keying on is 278,510 albums
being sold. That's a full third of what Nielsen reports to have been
released since 1992.
In 2005, Tunecore arrived (Note).
They're a little less public with their numbers, but I know that
last year, they claimed
90,000
new releases, just about the same as Nielsen reported for the entire
industry. Unless CDBaby went on a hiatus for the year, obviously
there's a huge pile missing (CDBaby is going to provide their 2009
numbers, which will be added here when then arrive). Let's add Catapult to
that. They released more than 10,000 new titles in 2009. There's
also Ditto Music, IODA,
The Orchard, MusicBizAcademy,
RouteNote, FUGA,
and that's just the first page of Google
results for "digital music distribution." Who's missing
from this picture? How about ReverbNation? If you use FaceBook
at
all, you know who they are. They wouldn't give me any numbers ("...we
just don't release numbers about our premium services as a matter
of policy"), but they are certainly one of the major players
in independent digital distribution.
And what
about the majors and
what they distribute?
Makes Nielsen's numbers obviously useless to determine
what's really happening. So what is happening?
I talked to Derek Sivers, who sold CDBaby off to DiskMakers
around 2007-2008. He said that when he left, they had been taking
orders for around 200 new album releases every day. That's more than
70,000 new releases in a year, which is just slightly under what
Nielsen shows for the entire industry at that point in time. I don't
know how many actually were added to the stores. Derek
couldn't tell me that, but did say that
the majority of them were orders for 100 to 1000 copies to be duplicated.
What happened after these copies hit the streets and
landed in the laps of the musicians that ordered them?
And what about all of us with the time, patience and
means to simply burn our own CDs? I'm using Tunecore to place our
music on iTunes (Hayden's Wall and Hurricane Alley -- go buy a damn
copy so I can pay the electric bill). But the truth is that we sold
about 50 copies off the edge of the stage for every one that we sold
online.
Nielsen never counted any of them. Or any of the CDs
that the other thousands upon thousands of independent acts sold
off the stage. Hell, most of them probably didn't even report it
on their
taxes
(Dear
IRS -- I did).
The Big Question
While ReverbNation didn't provide me with their data,
Jed Carlson (co-founder and CEO) did have a very pertinent question
to ask. He wasn't the first to ask it, but I like the way he phrased
it:
As a reader, I'd like to know:
1. How many album
releases (and how many total songs released via album format)
2. How many single releases
3. How many video releases from each distributor AND from soundscan.
Just
seems to me like there is a lot of murkiness in the way people
are choosing to define words like 'release'. Need to compare
apples to apples.
"Murkiness" doesn't even begin to describe the music
industry's approach to their data. When
I first started discussing new releases in 2002, the RIAA immediately
removed all new release data from their website and it
took BusinessWeek to get an answer from them (the RIAA
has never answered a single inquiry from me), which conflicted with
what they had previously announced in press releases. They have since moved
all their data behind a paywall. And Nielsen charges
a fortune for their numbers, which are obviously
inaccurate.
A representative from on of the other distribution
services made the following observation:
I think they [SoundScan] are great at tracking labeled
artists sales from brick and mortar and even their digital tracks
from the
major music stores - but when it comes to independent artists (Which
make up over 50% of the purchased music market) they are lacking
any real credibility.
Personally, I don't think the industry wants anyone
to be able to compare apples to apples. They prefer to throw
everything in a blender so that the individual components which
make up the industry statistics are impossible to distinguish. It's
so much easier to hide the truth when it isn't really there to begin
with. The Conclusion
"What
you'll see in the near future is a million artists and about
500,000 labels, and many artists
becoming their own labels. The
whole
album paradigm will be redefined. It will be a singles marketplace and
it will be shared by a million hands."
Chuck D. -- July,
2000
"A paradigm is like a theory, but
a little different. A theory is an idea that sets out to explain
how something works, then it's
tested,
proved or disproved, supported or challenged by experiment and reflection.
A paradigm is a set of implicit assumptions that are not meant to
be tested; in fact, they are essentially unconscious."
What
the Bleep Do We Know, via FaceBook — Sept. 2010
Since 2003, Apple has sold more singles than the music
industry did over it's entire history prior to the iTunes Music Store.
10 billion songs, last I heard. There's still a problem with quoting
this and keeping it in context, though. Many (perhaps the majority)
of those song sales were as part of complete albums. Still, the industry
had almost completely killed the single before Apple got involved
with music sales, so even if it doesn't directly apply, it is significant
in terms of the landscape shifting. Services like Tunecore have been singled out for criticism by people
like Tommy
Silverman, who will tell you that 80 percent of the artists
using Tunecore to get into Apple are crap because they sell 100 copies
or less in a year.
“Those are the people who are using TuneCore and iTunes
to clutter the music environment with crap, so that the artists
who
really are pretty good have more trouble breaking through
than they ever did before."
Silverman missed two very important points.
The first is that 80% crap is still a 20% success rate. The RIAA
only claims 5% success. So that's 95% crap. And Silverman's record
is no better.
Tunecore lets anybody through. The labels pick and choose. Tunecore
has a higher success ratio. Draw your own conclusions on that one.
The second point is that as little as 6 years ago, none of those
artists selling less than 100 copies were in retail at all. We sold
zero copies online. So even one sale is better.
The thing I'm focusing on from Silverman's statement is this: "...the
artists who
really are pretty good have more trouble breaking through
than they ever did before."
That seems a little ridiculous as a general statement. Just having
an album (or 100,000 albums), on iTunes doesn't interfere with anyone's
sales. They don't bury other releases (like the majors used to do with
cover songs, where a minor hit would come along and all the big stars
would record their version which would literally "cover" the original
release at the retail level).
iTunes works kind of like peer-to-peer, in the sense that you generally
have to know what you're looking for in order to find it. If you
type in "Mariah Carey," that's what you're going to get. Nothing gets
in the way.
Maybe the major artists have more trouble breaking through than
ever before, but (in my opinion) that's because the RIAA taught the
college students to hate them.
And let's talk reality. It hasn't been "the artists who are really
pretty good" that have been at the top of the heap for decades. Not
since disco hit. Now it's the ones who are willing to sell out for
quick cash, follow the rules, fit themselves into the mold of the flavor
of the month and whore themselves out.
Being talented has almost nothing to do with it. It's all about
your ability to do business, not your skill at playing music. That's
why we have autotune.
Back to the point, which is that today's music business simply cannot
be seen in the industry reports. You can pile up all the stats and
data and the real music business just isn't in it. It's out on the
streets.
Times are tough. People have less money than ever to toss around
on music. Nothing
against Tom Petty (he's just my favorite star to pull out as an example),
but if I get $10 from you for a CD sold off the end of the stage
on Friday night, you might have to pass up on Tom's new album
when you
spot
it
on Saturday.
And there are hundreds of thousands of other acts doing the same
thing, almost every night of the week (your mileage may vary depending
on the size of the town). The artists "who are really pretty good"
are selling records.
But they're not on the charts. The charts don't tell you anything.
In the last 10 years or so, from mp3s, CD-Rs and the internet, then
the ability to get into the world's largest retailer while completely
bypassing the traditional label system, the entire paradigm of the
music industry has changed. No one sees it all. No one knows how
to measure it. Everything is upside-down and off the charts.
It's a new day, a new beginning.
The beginning is a very delicate time. -- Frank Herbert, Dune
Notes and Follow-Up
From Statscan's Sound Recording and Music Publishing data tables
for 2006 (via Kent Clark):
"It should be noted that data from this historical time
series should not be compared with data from this new survey
due to
significant differences in coverage and methodology.
"The new survey covers a somewhat
different set of businesses than in previous years so that
data generally cannot be expected to be
comparable. The list of names and addresses of businesses
is now drawn from a central Statistics Canada data base. Also,
a much
more
rigorous delineation of those companies that are considered
part of the culture sector has been applied through the implementation
of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).
This industry-based classification is a departure from the
activity-based
classification that was used previously. In addition to these
changes
in coverage, commencing with 2005, the data are based on
a sample of businesses."
So, the 2007 numbers are actually a different measurement than previous
years. However, they did modify historic data to create 2005 numbers
that could be trended.
Commentary
"So I read it, and it sounds like you've given up on your old theory.
I don't think you should. It's still valid, and its really obvious
that the industry has continued to produce fewer albums."
It's not so much that I've given up on my old theory, it's just
that the available data is in contradiction with the basic cause-and-effect
that used to seem so obvious.
"This recent
SoundScan number sounds like they're counting new data sets that
weren't previously being counted."
In a way, that's entirely correct. When we
had record stores, Nielsen used to survey some of them and estimate
the rest. A huge number
of independent releases that would have previously been ignored now
go through iTunes, Amazon, etc., and they finally show up in the
data.
"Also, the graph mixed with the soundscan stat is misleading,
though I see what you're trying to do. The soundscan and the graph
data
are measuring totally different things, and placing the two pieces
of data near each other implies a correlation."
My original theory drew a correlation between sales and releases.
Yes, they are two completely different measurements. But there
used to be an apparent correlation between them.
Note that some of SoundScan's data is intentionally misleading.
For four or five years now, every time their stats come out at the
end
of
the year,
they've been touting an increase in unit sales (or "purchasing decisions").
The problem with that methodology is that selling
300 singles for a buck each ($300) becomes a 50% increase over selling
200 albums at
$10 each ($2000).
I've seen this trip up many people who should know better.
"I was looking at your 2010 update on music sales and I found
this chart at The
Happy Hospitalist, and
i'll be hot diggity darned if the peaks and valleys of the velocity
of money in the US economy don't line up exactly with the units shipped
chart on your page. OK, OK, it's not perfectly lined up, but people
just didn't pick back up buying albums when the market rebounded
a tiny bit. Also, as you point out, the RIAA was suing their customer
base. Very interesting." — Nathan Curry
Corrections
1) The original version of this article stated that Tunecore started
up in 1996. The correct date is 2005. Actually, when I wrote the
article, I was under the impression that it opened in 2006.
It still would have been wrong, just not as eggregiously wrong. I
have no earthly
idea why I typed in 1996.
|
