| THE CHARTS, NOT
THE HEARTS AND MINDS
Have the Pop Charts ever been more irrelevant?
Most of us can remember when the Number One single was omnipotent;
booming out of lounge rooms, car radios, television sets, shops
& noisy neighbour’s parties all around us, you knew what
it was whether you wanted to or not. While “serious “
music lovers gravitated to the album format, there was a certain
small victory in being able to assemble 4 minutes of music that
could indelibly imprint itself on the psyche of millions regardless
of it’s musical worth.
It was an odd notion; ranking music competitively
like sport, based around a simple idea that benefited record shops,
record companies & radio stations, that if you could find out
what people wanted to hear & buy & give it to them over
& over again, that everybody would be happy & make a profit.
So there were retailers who were deemed to be “chart “
shops that each week would submit their sales figures & hence
the chart was calculated, tightly playlisted - radio would air those
records over & over while record companies knew which records
to press up in big numbers & could use chart positions to publicise
their products.
Even artists bought into it; The Beatles &
The Rolling Stones checked with each other so that they didn’t
compete with each other for the coveted spot & spaced their
singles accordingly, more recently, Oasis & Blur did the opposite
by releasing singles on the same day in a very public feud for the
top spot (Oasis won). But now the music audience has fragmented,
radio stations are audience targeted to particular demographs, music
shops are high - sales, volume - discounted chains, downloads &
MP3s elbow for space & there is no longer a centre, it has all
devolved to the periphery. And sales figures confirm it. Recently
in Australia a Number One single has been achievable with as little
as 5000 sales in a week, by Number 20 on the chart it was less than
1000 copies & that’s in a country of over 20 million people!
Silverchair’s new single has sold more on
downloads than retail through the shops, a sign of not only the
future but the present demise of the single. This week, no major
record company released a single in Australia & the largest
retail chain, Sanity will soon be no longer be stocking singles
at all.
But it’s not only the future of the single
that is in jeopardy.
Silverchair’s recent album, their 5th to debut at Number One,
breaking the record held by Midnight Oil, Cold Chisel & Jimmy
Barnes, sold a healthy 35,000 copies in a week, but that was the
total amount of all the other 9 albums in the Top Ten added together,
while last week’s Number One album only had to sell 5000 copies
to reach the zenith & the 20th best selling album moved under
2000 copies nationwide.
The dirty little secret of the way the charts
are calculated is that they are based not on sales over the counter,
but by orders by shops from the record companies. As a result, companies
can create incentives like gifts & discounts for retailers to
pre - order large quantities of discs regardless of actual consumer
demand in order to create a false illusion of success on the charts.
Perhaps that is why 3 months after the much touted chart success
of Bob Dylan’s latest album I could pick it up for $10 in
a large music retail outlet. So not only are the charts having less
& less sales to calculate their results on, the very basis of
their calculation is having less & less to do with actual consumer
demand.
In a recent address to the SXSW convention David
Byrne argued that digital download sales would overtake CD sales
by 2012, similar to when cassette sales in the 80s were vanquished
by the silver disc. Tried to buy a pre-recorded or even a blank
cassette tape (or VHS) lately? This means that manufacturing &
distribution costs will be virtually non -existent for record companies
but he questioned whether the companies would adjust the current
under $2 that most artists get per CD as a result of the those savings.
It’s only the very top echelon of artists
that can currently make a living from record sales alone anyway.
For most performers, CDs are break even or loss leaders that enable
the performer to garner the publicity, interviews & air play
that means they can continuously tour the world playing to the 1000
people or so that are their fan base in each of the cities that
they visit. That generates the real income that performers can live
off, not record sales. Even Byrne admitted that once music is dominated
by digital downloads that sound quality will suffer, “ It
doesn’t have to sound good to move people, “ he said,
but will provide a boost for live music which where most performers
need to generate income.
Strange to think that in the past that people
went to live concerts wondering if the show would sound as good
as the record, but in the future would know that it would have to
sound better than the digital dross that they have to settle for
otherwise.
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