To us it's interesting that moving 23,000 units gets an act to 10 on the Billboard 200. No real idea where 23,000 would have ranked in the Golden Age of the '70s, & no idea how the charts are done now (Strictly CD sales, still, or are those download things accounted for?) but we'd have to figure that 23,000 albums then would have been a lot farther down the top 200.Sun debuted at No. 10 on the Billboard 200—a record for the artist—with sales of 23,000. According to Nielsen Soundscan, total sales are now at 54,000 units. In comparison, Power’s 2008 album Jukebox debuted at No. 12 on sales of 29,000 units in its debut week and has sold a total of 137,000 copies to date.
A good-selling album for an established artist like Marshall is gravy—musicians make the bulk of their net income from touring and merchandise sales.
And we do know that bigger acts made most of their money from (musical) product, not tchotchkes & touring; hitting the road was pretty much a grim necessity to "support" a new album, & tours would often be lucky to break even.
It's all upside down, like the Party of Lincoln today being the party of tea-bagging racist crackers.
4 comments:
Yeah, but when something as fundamental as music can be completely unbundled from its constituent atoms, that is a pretty goddam cool thing...
I always do what I can to support touring musicians, as I suspect I may have mentioned. However, I missed her when she played Milwaukee a few days ago and now regret it.
mikey, unbundling musicians from making a living is, however, a bad thing.
I think of production costs of touring - apart from the actual expense of travelling and sleeping - as industry kickback. No reason at all why you can't take your stuff from place to place if you have a reasonable following. Some friends do Europe every summer: there's a lot of state subsidy for performance, they travel light, and they come back with a whole bunch of money in their pockets.
Bands who are smart specify to their stupid fucking labels that they will take care of the touring.
mikey, unbundling musicians from making a living is, however, a bad thing.
This would be true, but the key thing to recognize is not that this is the end of making a living making music or art or literature but rather that the profit-making part of that endeavor is in transition. With iron clad locks on access, the record labels decided a few decades ago that the purpose of providing music was to make record label employees and executives rich. That's not only ridiculous, it's objectively venal.
Sadly, the makers of the art will necessarily suffer while the "industry" fights for it's undeserved survival. Once it is well and truly dead, and there is no place for business-side intermediaries between musicians and their markets, things will turn around. The BEST contribution we can make to this outcome is to make absolutely certain that NONE of the money we spend consuming music goes to anyone but the band.
There was a time when the distribution of small numbers of units to tens of thousands of outlets and the marketing associated with selling acts to a consumer base that had no direct access to the bands was an important skill, even as it led to a lot of corruption. But, just as it has changed other types of publishing, the internet has changed music publishing. Bands can provide their product directly to their consumers. Ultimately, those at the top will make less money, but they WILL be able to make a decent living making music. And that is what art is supposed to be...
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