Nielsen Soundscan rolled out its third quarter report for the music industry last week and, as you may have guessed, things continue to look bad.
Things are especially sour in the albums department. Absolutely no performer has gone platinum-or sold a million copies of an album-during 2014. As it stands, it doesn't seem like this year's biggest sellers, Eric Church and Coldplay, will reach the million-mark before the need of the year, as both are lingering around 720,000 copies sold. The bestselling albums by individual performers this year are actually releases that dropped during 2013, Beyoncé's self-titled album and Lorde's Pure Heroine, with 776,000 and 752,000 copies respectively. It's worth noting that the Frozen soundtrack has gone three-times platinum during 2014, and both Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks have good chances of surpassing platinum status when their respective albums drop in the next few months.
Still, the outlook ain't good.
At this point last year, five albums had already broken the million mark. Also, at this point last year, 83 digital singles had sold more than a million copies, while there have only been 60 so far this year. CD sales decreasing is, unfortunately, not a surprise. The lag in download sales is more troubling for an industry that was banking on it. Digital track sales saw a 5.7 percent drop during 2013, which has further increased to 12.9 percent this year.
The news that music fans will always point to is that once again vinyl sales have made a huge jump. Sales of the groovier format are up a truly impressive 47.5 percent, making us analysts wonder how long the format can keep up its ridiculous growth. Much of that is thanks to Jack White and Lazaretto, which sold nearly 50,000 vinyl copies when it debuted earlier this year. Still, the total number of vinyl records moved comes to just more than 6 million...not nearly enough to offset the losses mentioned above.
We don't care how you get your music...but do future generations a favor and make sure that somehow something is going toward the people making it.
