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Sales sales sales
To bring home the way the market has shifted in the past five years, let’s dispense with the allegory and compare some present-day Billboard numbers with those posted five years ago.
First, look at the albums filling the top three slots the week of June 5, 1999. Numbers 1, 2 and 3 were albums by the Backstreet Boys, Ricky Martin and Britney Spears – the ultimate in manufactured pop. Then look at the chart for the week of June 5, 2004. There were still a few semifamiliar names in the top spots – R&B crooner Usher, Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man – and their popularity is easy enough to understand, even if a few years ago they would have seemed like one-week flukes. After that, though, the chart became baffling.
The third-best-selling record in the country was by New Found Glory, a veteran emo group signed to a fake indie called Drive-Thru (it’s funded by Universal Music Group). Where once there were only widely acknowledged superstars in Billboard’s upper reaches, now the charts are dominated by acts like these — artists that are known but are by no means world-famous, and probably never will be.
The differences get stranger still if we open up the sample. For instance, the top 25 of 1999 was home to the Dixie Chicks’ Wide Open Spaces (10 million records sold), ‘N Sync’s ‘N Sync (10 million), Britney Spears? Baby One More Time (12 million), Backstreet Boys’ debut (13 million), and Shania Twain’s Come On Over (17 million). These five records had total sales of more than 60 million.
Compare this to the top 50 from June 5, 2004. With the lone exception of OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, there’s not a single record with over 5 million in sales – and even OutKast was helped along by the fact that each purchase counted as two (it’s a double-disc set). Dotting the list are albums by less-than-superstar acts like Morrissey and Modest Mouse. If you explore the Top 50?s lower regions, there’s even an ATP-worthy band like Franz Ferdinand neck-and-neck with Lionel Richie’s comeback, Just for You, and American Idol Season 3: Greatest Soul Classics.
The mainstream record industry would argue that p2p file sharing has decimated the ability to sell records by crossover acts, but on closer inspection the collapse seems more like a tumbling house of cards. The fact is, sales are going up overall, but the charts just aren’t being monopolized by the same big names that dominated a few short years ago.
