Most retailers had a very good Black Friday this year, but music retailers were singing a different tune (GET IT???), as they saw much lower than expected sales.
Music sales were down from 10 percent to 30 percent, and big-name albums released for Black Friday, the post-Thanksgiving kickoff to the holiday retail season, didn’t perform up to expectations, according to merchants contacted by Billboard.
Sources said that Kanye West’s “808s & Heartbreak” will sell in the range of 425,000-450,000 units, significantly down from 700,000-975,000 units previously projected.
Guns N’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” is expected to clock in at 250,000-260,000, not the predicted 300,000-784,000 units.
At music specialty stores Newbury Comics, sales were down 21 percent on a comparable-store basis for the last two weeks of November, while music sales were down 28 percent, the Brighton, Massachusetts-based chain’s CEO, Mike Dreese, reported.
At big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble, label executives reported that hit-album sales were off significantly for the Black Friday weekend, anywhere from 30 percent to 40 percent.
So is it that no one’s buying music — because everything’s available for free online these days, both illegally and legally — or is it just that they’re buying it from iTunes or Rhapsody or other digital retailers? If so, why? For instance, the entire Britney Spears album is streaming on BritneySpears.com. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I just grabbed the embed code, and now the Britney Spears album is streaming on EvilBeetGossip.com. In fact, I’m gonna put it in the damn sidebar. There we go. That took all of twenty seconds. Why would anybody pay money for this album now?
The game has to change, guys.
Thanks for the sidebar Beet, but I know I will but Circus from iTunes right now just to show the world that we still believe in our girl!
buying music from stores is silly. i buy a lot from itunes. i usually only want a song or several per cd. when I was younger, I wasted so much money on CDs just for like one song. it totally sucked.
the music industry needs to figure out how to change
hahahahah.
I don’t see why people actually buy this stuff anymore. I stopped when I moved out of the US and no longer had access to the content I took for granted before. There’s a bunch of FREE stuff that I’m barred from seeing.
Now I download everything for free. There are so many options, if they take some down, others will pop up. Not too mention it’s much faster than actually going to the store.
I’ll pay for movies in the theatre and concerts but not for DVDs and CDs or most software (especially now that they’re putting commercials in there too).
I agree with ThatLisa, I buy from iTunes.
I also have “morals” about what I’ll buy and download illegally. An up-and-coming artist or a genre or a Canadian artist, I’ll buy because I want to support it. I’ll pay for a Killers album because I want to support that type of music.
As for established artists (i.e., Rolling Stones) or embarrassing pop (i.e., Fergie, Britney), I’ll illegally download or just plain go without. The music isn’t classic, it’s only fun for the moment so if I can’t have it for free, I can live without it.
Every single Rolling Stone issue starts off with the plight of the record companies, they’ve been suffering for years.
Oh yeah, and Springsteen is God.
i feel like the people who still buy albums in stores are the people to whom it’s important to have a material *something*. i can understand that, the desire to have something you can hold in your hand, even if you could get the main product more easily and cheaply somewhere else. to me it’s kind of like paying extra for the special edition of a movie you really like – what you’re paying for is the assurance that you’re not missing out on anything. i also agree with persistent cat that it’s nice to be able to buy albums from artists you want to support, and i like what bobina says – i want to show the world (and the artist) that we still believe! i’m a starving college student without much of a budget for music, so this is pretty much a hypothetical question to me, but i have stopped downloading illegally.
new music sucks shit right now. or maybe i am just finally getting old.
Just like DanTheMan I’m not in the US right now and all I can get on record stores is like.. Shakira and Enrique Iglesias. So there’s really no point on even going to see if maaaaaaaybe they have a relatively underground album.
Even when I was in the US I’d never buy from record stores, I’d go to trade stores… I’d give them a cd or dvd I didn’t want anymore and get another one for free or no more than 1$.
Now I just download illegaly or buy from the artists themselves, most of the bands I listen to give away free stuff if you buy their single and is usually pretty cheap too.
I also would try to support smaller, current artists but I’m not really into any. 95% of the music I like is over 10 years old. Classical, jazz from the mid to late fifities, rock, 80’s hits, etc. I don’t really care if the estates of Lennon, Hendrix, Coltrane, etc. and the movie companies get any more money.
And another thing, I live in a country that receives hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid and trade tax benefits, yet they openly sell US based artists and software on the street, in shops, etc.
Common place throughout the world? Yes, but what they don’t mention is that if they do the same to local artists and software companies, the police will come down on them hard. If my governemnt going to allow foreign government affiliated gangs make millions off of this illegal trade (and other things that are MUCH worse than illegal downloads) and give them hundreds of millions more, I’m not going to lose sleep from downloading a few songs and movies.
“yet they openly sell US based artists and software on the street, in shops, etc.”
should have said “openly sell illegal copies of US based artists…”
I haven’t been buying music since Napster hit the scene in ’99.
ThatLisa LOL, so true. How many CDs do I have sitting on my shelf at home that I bought back in the day because I liked ONE song? And then if I was lucky I might end up liking a couple other songs…maybe. It is embarrassing to think about how many CDs I own that have one lousy song I like or god, that I don’t even like anymore.
And let me tell you, I love my old hair bands but they balanced out some of their hits with some really awful stuff on their albums and we ended up paying for it.
Same here AL! I’ve never bought music online… and I own three CDs. Only because they were ones that were really important to me.
I’m sat that Newbury Comics was hurt because I really like their business model going forward and have probably put one of Mike’s kids through college with the amount of money I spent on CDs there. For those of you not in the New England area, you are missing out on something special.
The availability of music online is going to render most music stores obsolete and that’s why I like Newbies going forward because of two reasons. First, they have a diversity in the store, just like Wal-Mart and Best Buy on a smaller scale. They have CDs, DVDs, some video games, some toys and clothes and gag gifts and collectibles. The second thing they have, which I can’t find in any major retailer, are vinyls. They always had a lot of hip-hop/club stuff for DJs but they are starting to expand their selection as more artists put out vinyls copies and labels are re-issuing old albums. I honestly believe that things are going to come full circle to like the 1940s and 50s, albeit more technologically inclined. Bands will continue to put out hard copies as vinyls but CDs will fade away because you basically can get the same quality as a CD on the internet for a fee or free. But for music collections and fans such as myself, there will stories like Newbury Comics that will be accurately described as record stores.
Elvis didn’t put out 14 song albums with a few singles on there, he would record a single and Sun Records released it as a 45 with that song and a B-Side. I think iTunes is going to replace that but keep that same production process alive. Rather than wasting money on extra songs and studio sessions, pop artists will record 3-4 songs and they will be released directly onto iTunes and maybe at the end of the year, if the artist has like 4-5 hit singles, MAYBE the label will compile them all onto an album. People who love music and want to hold onto something tangible or hear the music in a slightly different way will have their albums and people looking for a hit single or a club song can find it on iTunes. 20 years from now, that’s how I see things going down. I’m really excited to see how things shake out.
We used to buy CDs for one song. We had so many, it was ridiculous. Then one day, we got robbed. Some punk ass kid took all our CDs and CD-ROMs. Insurance offered to replace them all but really, did the Fastball CD need to be replaced? Remember White Town’s Your Woman? That CD sucked but we had it. We told insurance we didn’t want to replace them so they gave us $15 per CD!!!!! With the money, we went to NYC for the first time and saw U2 at MSG.
So thanks punk ass kid.