Maroon 5 have had over 78 million plays of Moves Like Jagger on 2 uploaded videos. Be interested to know what they'll make from it.

that's 78 million on each video!

....that's over 75 million plays on each video.

Will, 

Can I consolidate/update these 3 comments into one?

/paul

Long Tail theory is why we have companies like Tunecore which are making money off of $50 acc'ts.  

Artists, on the other hand, are losing money mostly.

: MW

Losing money really depends on what each individual expected ROI is for an artist. 

That's a very subjective thing. 

Every artist has value in different areas of their work, and career. What one artist considers losing money on album or song sales, another considers it the cost of acquisition for fans.

Losing money, and not making as much money as you were, or think you should be or would be making are very different things. 

If you're going to point out Tunecore, you might as well throw in Topspin, Reverbnation and pretty much any other company that offers you a service. 

and that is somehow the service provider's fault?

indies are addicated to production and allergic to promotion.

Tunecore and other services like them are simply filling a need the indie artist has. 

if the indie isn't selling anything, maybe they shouldn't be producing anything until they have a reason to.

just because you can produce a song doesn't mean you should sell it, or that anyone should even buy it.

This kind of sophomoric snark involving statistics really serves no purpose, Paul.  What's your point?

I think this speaks volumes about the extreme concentration of sales at the top, and what that means for newer and developing artists.  And, further, it informs the strategy as it specifically relates to recordings.

So that's why I published it!

/paul 

i don't think 1,500 Albums makin' most of the $$$ is thta big of a deal. Sounds about right. I probably couldn't name 1,500 bands if my Life depended on it..

& with the big influx of wanna-be Artists (due to the digital age), most are not serious or not ready to realy be apart of this statistic..

@Mo_Gutta_Game

Exactly right.  The record business has ALWAYS been this way.  It isn't news unless you were born yesterday.

The long-tail approach is about multiple revenue streams, not a single stream, so while the statistic is interesting, it has no relationship to the long-tail. Apples meet oranges. What record sales mean to newer and developing artists is an entirely different story that comes much later, if ever, in the artist's development cycle.

Something I'm sure a lot of small labels have sensed for a while.

I place a lot of blame on commercial radio stations.  They only play about 2% of the new music, so of course only 2% of artists are going to make most of the sales.

right, there is no middle class. it's an unofficial monopoly. 

99% pretty much  . . . .

you really need to look at this chart to understand this.

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120110house

It really isnt news if you just think about what albums are actually stocked by Walmart, etc. The general public want music and clearly they're not picky enough to shop around.

I'd be interested to know what the figures were for last year, or other preceding years for that matter. Is this part of a trend?

Sad. Has anyone thus far generated a comparative report on artist-distribution sales across various eras, such as the prior decades? Just how longtailish were different musical decades?

I would surmise:

1950s-early 1960s no long tail, since there was a very limited number of artists with access to record labels and radio.

late 1960s - 80s: increasing long tail, as record labels, sublabels, record stores, and radio stations (including college radio) proliferated.

1990s: decreasing long tail, as labels and radio stations consolidated, and record sales increasingly moved to "big box" stores with limited selection of CDs, often sold as loss-leaders.

2000s-present: decreasing long tail, despite availability and ease of access to more music than ever before. Apparently tastes are still largely dictated by the same consolidated corporations, and most listeners are unable or unwilling to explore further.

That is all just conjecture on the spur of the moment. An analysis of the numbers would be very valuable. Does such exist?

Best regards,

- Versus

This story comes out every year. If it's news to you, welcome to the music business.

Hasn't the last few years have been like this?

77000 albums is an awful lot of music. If it means 750 000 songs, it means 3 000 000 minutes of music. Even if you'd listen to music 8 hours a day, it'd still take over 17 years to listen through them.

I'd dare to say an awful lot of those albums are recorded in bedrooms and mostly sold via online services. Problem is that a large majority of those are made with minimal effort towards quality and attention to detail. It's not just marketing that is missing. A good batch of songs on a quality record is much easier to sell and market than a messy batch of unfinished songs that are published just because it's so easy to throw them online.

I'll take my professional quality filters and a colorful indie scene which actually appreciates good songwriting and attention to detail any time over the current overload of uncritical amateurism, thank you.

This is a pretty bold statement here, mostly because this is a matter of taste. People like the music they like for different reasons...just like they get to choose what they're favorite color is and really don't have to justify why to anyone else. It's personal. 

How that music is made or gets to market is really irrelevant at this point. A "quality filter" could be a blog, the radio, or your friend. 

Consumers consume different ways at different times for different reasons, and though a "messy" batch of songs to one person has more value than what many people would call "dreck" that is pushed by millions of marketing and pr via huge multi media campaigns. The big ones come and go, as do the little ones...just a different set of stakes. 

Your colorful indie market has it's own set of filters, and it sorts through those messy bundles in it's own way. At this point in time everyone has the right to make music and put it out, that's never going away. They can bitch about it not selling, and the consumer can bitch about lack of quality, but no one is entitled to anything.

Gaetano,

I completely understand what you are saying about it being a personal decision. I agree that it's a personal choice, and I'm all for that. And I totally agree with your last sentence; "they can bitch about it not selling, and the consumer can bitch about lack of quality, but no one is entitled to anything". I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of people wouldn't call those 2% albums "dreck".

What I'm more concerned about is that no one dares to say that people still need to get pretty good at what they do before they can dream about making a living with their music. If one gets caught up in the "internet logic", he will be quickly seduced into believing that merely putting his stuff online is enough. The web companies celebrate this kind of amateurism because it works in favor of them -and it works because people easily lose grip of their ego.

We have to take into account the fact that today there is an unlimited number of songs to "choose" from. No one has the time to go through all of them before they decide if they like it or not. So how do we decide what's worth listening to?

The historian George Dyson wrote that a Google engineer once said to him: "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an A.I." The web 2.0 companies and organizations all seem to be thinking this way. To them, books, movies, music is all just information, and the more they accumulate it, the better - for them.

What is currently happening is that amidst the web 2.0 craze people are almost being brainwashed into believing that some Google algorithm will soon take the place of human beings in deciding what's worth listening to. It is beneficial to the tech companies if people start actually believing that kind of crap, because then the role of human beings who actually know their craft (be it a musician, an A&R, a producer or a music critic) can be played down in favor of their algorithms.

And there's the friend recommendations. Zuckerberg has this idea of "frictionless sharing" inside Facebook. But that will eventually transform into just another form of spam because people are getting too much recommendations, so suddenly everything seems worth listening to.

Great points, 

I completely agree in regards to the complete and utter lack of development nowadays. People put stuff out because they can, and though the old label system had a way of locking out 98% of artists, once upon a time it did invest in developing some of the other 2% (that doesn't even really happen anymore). 

I agree that huge things like developement and curation are what's missing, we're too busy consuming.

Sounds like you're probably familiar with Jaron Lanier and his predictions, talk of the future of the Noosphere. It's a terrifying prospect, but a marketing dream and Zuck and co are right up in there. 

The one thing I heard the other day that I thought was relevant was comparing the music industry right now to when the automobile industry started to boom. At one point there were 200 auto makers in the US.

Obviously the majority of those were weeded out, it just took a while.  

Right now, it's not just the amount of artists, it's the amount of blogs talking about those artists making the cacophony that much thicker. Google any one hyped band and you'll literally get hundreds of blogs you've never heard just copying and pasting the content from another bigger, more trusted one.  

Rinse, Repeat, Retweet. 

Then, that is called "trending" which apparently equals some type of metric to measure the worth or value of an artist. 

It's all created in a vacuum, and it's enough to make your head spin, and hurt. 

Gaetano,

I'm happy to see we're having very similar thoughts about this.

Yes, I am familiar with Jaron Lanier's writings about the web 2.0 movement, and it was him (along with a dose of Nicholas Carr) who actually turned my head to see what it was all really about. 

There was a time when I thought that the Silicon Valley spin (not forgetting the pirates and the whole wiki movement who use the same rhetoric as Silicon Valley) was the truth.

But the more years go by, the harder it is too see any real substance in the whole "YouTube" economy. It really is a vacuum. It all goes to the tech companies and the crowd happily accepts that as long as they can get good albums and movies for free.

I think it's a bubble that will burst when more and more people start doing work that can be digitized and start realizing they are shooting themselves in the foot. People still think it's a limited problem and so they see it as a "RIAA vs the people" situation, but it's really about the work of all people vs the technocratic web 2.0 oligarchs and the singularitarian geeks who essentially lure people into believing they'd actually have any idea about a sustainable model which allows people to live by doing intellectual work. They're too busy cashing in, while they're telling everyone else to "just wait".

Apple is a bit different, because at least in the Jobs ecosystem there is an actual place for the content creators. iTunes is a decent model and it's verifiably working. But I think the problem needs to be fixed on a general scale, and a lot of it has to do with revealing the endless web 2.0 spin that people are lured into.

I'm so glad that Jaron Lanier has stepped up against the technocratic trend created by his colleagues - the world needs to know that not everyone opposing them is a luddite who just doesn't "understand" technology.

We are the 98% ha ha!

WOW!

Nothing new, really.

Jeff Price has another meltdown in 3... 2... 1...

This of course excludes all the sales that Soundscan fails to tally.. ie.e everythign WITHOUT a barcode... which is a large volume of independant releases. These numbers are not entirely reliable.

And what about the total marketing spend on those 2% of albums was vs the bottom 98%?

preach!

Paul,

I know I've been highly critical of DMN's angle on streaming services (namely Spotify), but it's articles like this one that made me start reading DMN two or three years ago.

Statistics and the state of our industry is a lot more interesting than the sensationalism your site seems to reach for when it comes to Spotify & Artists.

So more of this and less sensationalism please and thank you!

So, Spotify can't help 90% of releases to make reasonable sales. It can only help the 2%?

Come  on, IT crowd, looking forward to your pathetic defense on this.

Where are you going with this?

Spotify is neither here nor there in regards to issues at hand. 

It might have cannibalized some of the 2% and some of the 98%

It might have generated a sale for them too. 

No one knows. There's no metric for any of these issues prove anything...and therein lies the rub for anyone trying to make a blanket statement regarding the stats. 

It's users using or not using and people buying or not buying. 

"In 2011, 76,875 albums were released..."



I've read that Soundscan has reported as many as 100,000 albums released – 2008 I believe that was, but I can't seem to find any figures for past years going back to 1991, the year of their inception. I'm curious to see if the number of albums released in the 90s was significantly lower than what is being reported now. My suspicion is that when you take into account that Nielsen figures are to varying degrees inaccurate due to their sampling techniques, and also that the vast majority of indie releases simply don't show up on their radar, the number of "albums released" has skyrocketed since the advent of the WWW.



That increase alone is enough to validate the Long Tail, but like I keep saying in forums all over the web, the vast majority of indie ("early-stage artists") sales just don't show up in Soundscan, even if the product is registered with them. Plus, the idea of "recordings" and "units" as a measure of income or artist success is no longer all that valid. Artists are finding new ways to monetize their art and sell "units." It is definitely a "long tail" phenomenon in the sense that it relates to targeted, niche marketing, but the way it shows up in the tail is still not easily quantifiable. It may never be. Does revenue from YouTube views show up in Soundscan? Are those views considered a "single," or a "unit?" What about releases sold through a crowdfunding effort?


Furthermore, the Long Tail Theory is not some sort of panacea that can either "fail" or succeed, it's really just a way of explaining a market phenomenon, nothing more. The theory is sound, whether or not any particular product ends up registering a blip in the tail or not.


Ultimately, any effort to accurately measure the indie market using the traditional yardsticks will fail.

I think you're right. Found this from 2009:

o Albums that sold at least one copy in 2009: 98,000

o Albums selling more than 10,000 units in 2009: 1,319

o Albums selling more than 10,000 units in 2008: 1,515

o Albums selling more than 250,000 units in 2009: 85

o Albums selling more than 250,000 units in 2001: 214

o Albums selling more than 5,000 units in 2009: 2,058

o Albums selling under than 1,000 units in their first year of release: 92,601

o Number of albums selling less than 100 copies in 2009: 81,000

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/072110nmsstats

And the 75,000 albums that make up the 98% sold less than 150 copies a piece on average. 

Not good, but it's all the labels' fault.

A must read.

I am hesitant to tweet these 2011 record sales stats, but it's life as we know it. The long tail is now the long fail.

What this is telling me is that this is one of the best times to be involved in music production. With so much music being made, it's not as important that it sells right away - all this music that has been recorded has a longer lifetime, and should be looked at from a historical perspective.

...Steve>>>

Stop tripping about the 90% / 2%.

Focus on making great music people feel so passionate about they want to OWN, and you win.

#truth

would be nice to know how many of the 1500 came via the majors and if this changed over the years. 

Long tails come with "fat heads".

wowwww...

What about total income to the artist? Concerts/merch?

Pour ceux qui doutent encore sur l'utilité de faire des disques.

We are the 98%! Occupy the Music Biz?

That's crazy!

Don't believe the doomsday hype.

Crazy, sad stat.

This is some hurtful shit...

C'est drist.

I would love to see how this compares to years past.

More proof that there's no money in records for developing artists...

Paul, is there any way to find out where the cutoff is on the curve? I'm sure this is the only time in their lives indie musicians would be proud to be in "The One Percent" (or two percent) haha... my estimate would be around 1500 sales 

I don't, but when I get more information on this, I'll share it.

Record labels are finding out rapidly that album sales are only part of the picture in today’s digital age. Less people are buying CDs, but more are willing to attend a concert etc., so they have to start capitalizing on that or lose out.

Mike - Record labels