Music is getting bigger..record sales are going waaayyy down.

https://www.bloomberg.com...ecord.html

Adele’s Worst Selling-Album Is Still the Year’s Biggest Record

The music industry is getting bigger, but the hits are getting smaller.

Adele’s new album “30” was the best-selling record of 2021, and its success is a testament to her enduring popularity. The British singer finished December at the top of Bloomberg’s Pop Star Power Rankings and was one of the 10 biggest artists on both Spotify and YouTube.

But “30” is also a modest hit by Adele’s standards. It’s on pace to be her worst-selling album since her debut (and maybe ever).

The sales for “30” reflect a collapse of album sales industrywide over the last decade. Adele was the only artist to exceed 1 million copies last year. “30,” her fourth studio album, sold twice as many copies as any other despite its mid-November debut.

When Adele released “21” in 2011, at least 10 albums sold more than 1 million copies. The list included Lady Gaga, Michael Buble and Lil Wayne. Over the past few years, the number of artists who sell albums in volume has dwindled to two: Adele and Taylor Swift. They are the only musicians to sell more than 1 million albums in the U.S. since 2018. (Sales for Swift, as for Adele, pale to her peak in the first half of the 2010s.)

The obvious culprit is streaming. Sales refers to an individual purchase of an album (CD, vinyl or digital), data provider MRC also ranks the year’s biggest albums based on overall consumption. That includes album sales, song sales, on-demand audio streams and video streams. As more people stream, traditional sales have declined.

Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous” was last year’s biggest release, even though the country singer sold fewer than 300,000 albums. Listeners streamed “Dangerous” 3.65 billion times in the U.S. this past year. The Kid Laroi’s “F*ck Love” was the seventh biggest album of the year, even though he sold just 13,000 copies.

This collapse in traditional sales means the biggest artists aren’t making as much money from their recorded music. While music fans are streaming the equivalent of millions of albums, online listening doesn’t pay musicians as much as a vinyl record, CD or digital purchase from Apple Music.

But streaming has also reduced the impact and audience for an individual artist’s work.

Streaming has created an era of abundance. Platforms like Spotify and YouTube reduced the barrier to entry for any aspiring artist, which has led to a surge in new music (as well as podcasts, videos and all manner of media). These platforms now host bottomless catalogs of music, allowing users to access songs from more artists than they could listen to in a lifetime.

With abundance comes fragmentation. Even with the boom in streaming, the audience for the biggest albums is shrinking. Including the new metrics, the average consumption of the year’s 10 biggest albums has slumped almost 27% since 2015, the year Adele released “25.”

The overall music industry is growing, which is good for major music companies and all rightsholders. It has led to record sales of old catalog. But this fragmentation forces record labels to sign more acts and release more music to compete for their share of Spotify’s sales. (Their revenue is dictated by their market share.) It also forces musicians to release music more often to stay relevant.

“There’s a mentality with a lot of artists of always being ‘on,’” Interscope Records chairman John Janick said in a recent interview. Or, as his predecessor Jimmy Iovine said. “Nobody wants to go away.”

Adele has thus far resisted these trends and embraced an old school approach.

When Adele released “25” in 2015, she withheld the record from streaming services at first to boost sales, and that album still holds the mark for the single biggest debut. Adele sold more albums in one week of 2015 than Morgan Wallen, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake, Justin Bieber and Dua Lipa sold combined in this year.

She then didn’t release new music for six years, an eternity in modern culture. In the lead-up to the release of “30,”Adele sat for an interview with Oprah in a TV special and released a special edition just for shoppers at Target. She also secured placement on the biggest radio playlists (not a substitute for sales), and lined up vinyl production. Adele was the only act to release actual records at the same time as new music.

Does the performance of “30” make her reconsider? Or is this what a smash hit looks like in 2022? When it comes to streaming, Adele’s performance didn’t outpace her peers.

Both Adele and her record label declined to comment.

And this years biggest album is probably going to be a re-do of a Taylor Swift album, rumor is she is planning on 1989 next which was her biggest album. These are the only artists (newer generation) that generate actual physical sales. And with the focous all on streaming everyone now is really a singles artist. I mean now when an artist gets a deal or a song, its through social media, they played a bit of it on Tik Tok and now you have millions of clicks or streams, but that business model is very shaky because as I said recently a lot of these new artists dont even try, if they hear a beat and people are reacting to that beat then cash in on that beat. There are very FEW interesting artists coming out now that make anyone say "gotta have that" Alot of the physical sales of product excluding Adele, and Taylor Swift, comes from Rock and Country artists, though the Hip Hop genre is the one that is gravitated to for radio and streaming, its not selling physical product by in large, with the exception of maybe Drake but still he is a big streaming arist. Follow the ALBUM SALES chart instead of the Top 200 and look at the big differences in chart positions, you could have the number one selling album (meaning people bought product) and then look for that album on the Top 200, this is a constant thing, just a week or so ago Eddie Vedder had the number one selling album, but debuted at 29 on the main chart. The band the Pretty Reckless had the number five album seller upon their new release (which had four number one rock songs) but the album barely cracked the Top 30 n the top 200 chart.

Where would you go if you wanted to buy an album?

Wrecka Stow!

nayroo2002 said:

Where would you go if you wanted to buy an album?

Wrecka Stow!

That was almost too perfect of a set up.

The problem is WHO are you trying to sell too, or stream too? If you have a younger base crowd, they generally have little attention spans, the fact that most music is on everyones phone you are not just competiting with outside stuff, but people talk on the phone text, check insta, facebook tik tok, they almost are not even listening to their music, so you havve tons of artists who would love to drop more than a single, now the trend is an artist saying "I'm dropping six songs in six months" this is so they can cater to the minimal attention span the audience has.

PJMcGee said:

How about availability? Where would you go if you wanted to buy an album? There are some places to buy records, but really no place to buy CDs. Old folk like me would still buy CDs if they were in stores.

I'm pretty sure Walmart has CDs, even blank ones Unless you wanna buy rap CDs in which they only have the non-stickered clean versions.

I mean Adele's been out forever.

Who expected her numbers to remain that consistent, especially in this era?

PJMcGee said:

I don't go to Walmart. I'm in NYC.

Well...

https://www.timeout.com/newyork/music/best-record-stores-in-nyc

PJMcGee said:

I don't go to Walmart. I'm in NYC.

Well...

https://www.timeout.com/newyork/music/best-record-stores-in-nyc

and

https://recordstores.love/us/ny/newyork

You cant really site ADELE as "an artist to bank on", I mean her tours/shows are often cancelled, though this past residency was called due to COIVD many have speculated it was more than that due to the "night before" timing of the shows, but prior to COVID there were many cancellations due to exhaustion, vocal issues and I get it she puts it all emotionally into the work, BUT maybe people are just tiring of that formula. Also she takes a while between records and at some point people will just not jump on "the next thing". I mean some say you shouldnt FLOOD the market, but also they say "dont stay away too long" neither advice to me ever has been proven to be right or wrong. As for streaming since these numbers are so easily manipulated, I take that all with a grain of salt, telling me someone has 40 million streams of a song, means nothing to me, because I can then ask a person if they have heard that song, and they say "Whos that, never heard it" so your streams could be coming from people on the payroll leaving their phone on all night on repeat of your song and jacking up numbers, its useless.

It is known that some (record companies ?) use and pay click-farms to try and make certain music or artists popular.

Only, it doens't work like that.

I read that click farms are asked/payed to create/make a high numer of hits of a certain artist on youtube or elsewhere. Problem is, after the high numbers of hits, there is no guarantee of rising popularity or more streaming numbers for instance.

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https://www.clickcease.com/blog/click-farms-what-are-they-what-are-they-for/

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Vannormal said:

It is known that some (record companies ?) use and pay click-farms to try and make certain music or artists popular.

Only, it doens't work like that.

I read that click farms are asked/payed to create/make a high numer of hits of a certain artist on youtube or elsewhere. Problem is, after the high numbers of hits, there is no guarantee of rising popularity or more streaming numbers for instance.

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https://www.clickcease.com/blog/click-farms-what-are-they-what-are-they-for/

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Artists will tell their followers on Instagram to do this all the time, because if they get a certain amount of streams the service THEN puts them onto more popular playlists, which is really the goal in todays world, getting your song on a apple or spotify list

Vannormal said:

Target is in New York. They have a few CDs.