The Decemberists Score Their First Number One Album

rawkblog:

perpetua:

When I wrote this earlier I was astonished to learn that the Decemberists had managed to sell nearly five times as many copies of their new album in its first week than their previous record in its first week. Also, 65% of the units sold were digital albums, and Amazon was selling it for $3.99, which has to account for a pretty huge chunk of the overall sales. When Amazon do these deep discounts on digital releases they take the loss and the label/artist gets money for a full sale. So that’s great, it’s a legit win for the artist. If you look at a lot of these big indie music chart hits (Spoon, Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, of Montreal, etc), sales are mostly driven by these Amazon first-day/first-week discounts. Now it’s a lot to ask labels to lower their digital list prices when Amazon isn’t going to automatically take the loss leader hit, but it may be wise for the music industry to seriously consider dropping these prices to encourage sales in the future. It seems obvious that a huge number of people are more willing to buy digital albums at these lower prices, and getting less money is definitely better than getting no money.

Agree x1,000. I’ve been saying this for years. While it might not seem as obvious if I were in the position of selling records for a living, music is free: the closer you can get to free, the more albums you’re going to sell. Making music the price of a latte is no more arbitrary than making music the price of a latte and a bagel with lox.

Here’s the thing about music: It’s not a luxury good. Reaching the broadest number of people is the only way to make money. If you’re going to sell limited edition disc boxes for the hardcore fans, great, but there’s a handful of artists who can pull that off and the profits there are by their very nature limited. If you make the records cheap, you encourage the audience for the album, the t-shirt, the concert, the next album, the vinyl version, etc. Or people download it for free anyway, delete it, and everyone gets screwed.

“Reaching the broadest number of people is the only way to make money.”

This isn’t true. Maybe in theory, and maybe if “money” is preceded by “a lot of.” But sometimes exclusivity sells, and more importantly, there exist plenty of musicians for whom selling 90,000 copies of a record in it’s entire lifespan is completely out of range, yet still fund tours and then recording sessions on the back of $12 CDs. Many of them. For those people, $3.99/album as an industry standard is a real threat to any ability to sustain a career in music. And before arguing that bands that can’t hack it in a cut-rate reality, remember that those 90,000 sellers are the anomaly. Just saying.

Notes

  1. water-cooling reblogged this from bpmmusic
  2. rawkblog reblogged this from ganzer and added:
    What I meant by “broadest number of people” is, don’t do anything to limit your audience. Music, more than almost any...
  3. dunford reblogged this from perpetua
  4. graig-mccance reblogged this from blackbutshining
  5. elliottwrites reblogged this from perpetua and added:
    It’s also interesting...is actually good...piece....
  6. marathonpacks reblogged this from ganzer and added:
    Jacob Ganz, bringing it hard. Reminder that scale has to be factored in when we talk about uniform standards for an...
  7. ganzer reblogged this from rawkblog and added:
    “Reaching the broadest number of people is the only way to make money.”This isn’t true. Maybe in theory, and maybe if...
  8. rawkblog reblogged this from perpetua and added:
    Agree x1,000. I’ve been saying...for years. While it might not seem as obvious if
  9. immlass reblogged this from blackbutshining and added:
    I bought this on the Amazon cheap MP3 deal. I would have bought it without the cheap deal because I’d heard enough of it...
  10. blackbutshining reblogged this from perpetua
  11. evankaloudis reblogged this from perpetua
  12. bpmmusic reblogged this from perpetua
  13. olivertwisted reblogged this from perpetua and added:
    I don’t even consider looking...bad album (it’s pretty good),
  14. givingupthegun reblogged this from perpetua
  15. burnthemidnight reblogged this from perpetua
  16. perpetua posted this