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Originally Posted by robertshaw  it's debatable no one knows what's going to happen. there are plenty of artists that have sold 25 million that you'd look back and laugh at List of best-selling albums worldwide - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spice Girls? Linkin Park? Backstreet Boys?Oasis?Hootie? some pretty cheezy stuff. It will be done again. Labels just have to start signing bands that can actually write a record worth of great stuff. they're out there. Labels are just signing trendy bands now. They need to take some chances and sign some different bands and see where it goes. Until then it will be same old same old and sales will suffer.
Think about the Back Street Boys Millennium' selling 40 million?
That is more than Zep 4? It's pretty unbelievable when you think about it. Not that Zep is better than the BSBs but that zep 4 was available for 30 years before? Maybe they just didn't have accurate sales analysis back then. Everyone Ive ever met has that record. Not to mention we all had it on LP, 8track and then bought it on CD and then again on CD when they remastered it.
If Céline and Britney Spears can sell 20+ will it will happen again but someone actually good |
If you look at that list, you'll notice something quite striking. The more prevalent the internet became and downloading became popular, the fewer blockbuster albums there were. When you break it down by decade, clearly the industry as we knew it before vis a vis the "album" peaked in the '90s:
17 from the '70s and earlier
20 from the '80s
28 from the '90s
7 from the '00s
And the last album to make that blockbuster list was from 2004. Which means that in the last 5 years, when downloading and music acquisition has changed the most rapidly, there hasn't been a single blockbuster album of that level. What does this mean, that no one's made an album as good as Usher's Confessions or with as many hit singles since then? False.
So what's changed?
The method of music acquisition. Ask kids today about CD's and they'll laugh in your face, you might as well be talking about wax cylinders. And most of them who do actually buy music aren't purchasing whole albums, they're purchasing the single they like.
The paradigm has changed. Any illusions that we're going back to "album sales" as the primary measuring stick in the new age of acquisition and consumption habits are just that, illusions. We might as well lobby for bringing back film as the primary method of consumer photography over digital. It's not coming back in that form anymore.