Member Since: 10/14/2011
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Emeli Sandé destroyed the UK music industry; may not recover
Will 2014 be the year the album business fell apart?
In recent years, albums from the likes of Adele and Emeli Sandé have hit 1m sales in the UK. But with even the biggest acts failing to match them this year, the blockbuster album looks increasingly like a relic of the past
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The health of the UK albums market has often been read in terms of how many albums smoothly glide past the 1m sales mark – big successes help pull the overall market up, and the record business whoops with joy. In 2011, at the height of the Adele frenzy, a number of albums comfortably crossed the million threshold; but 2013’s biggest albums barely nudged past 600,000, and 2014 is shaping up to be even glummer. The blockbuster album, in sales terms at least, is increasingly looking like a relic from a different era.
We are now almost midway through the year, and all of 2014’s biggest albums appear to be limping behind their chart counterparts of recent years.
It’s no secret that album sales have been falling. In 2003, there were 159m album sales in the UK; last year, there were 94m. Trying, however, to draw satisfyingly unified conclusions about the performance of particular albums within an overall market that is cracked and stuttering is impossible.
Adele managed to have the biggest selling album in the UK in 2011 (3.7m) and the second biggest album of 2012 (786,000) with the same record – namely 21, an album so aberrantly successful it created its own centre of gravity where normal rules no longer applied.
Echoes of this dynamic came hot on her heels. The biggest album of 2012 was Emeli Sandé’s Our Version of Events (1.4m). It was also the second biggest of 2013 (683,000), but that year’s biggest was Midnight Memories by One Direction with 685,000 sales.
Was it underwhelming for the biggest album of 2013 to outsell an album that was almost two years old (Sandé’s album came out in February 2012) by a mere 2,000 copies? Well, no and yes. Those One Direction sales were for just five weeks as it came out at the end of November. But so far this year, it has sold 112,000 copies. Their current tour may bump up those sales, but it feels like it’s approaching its peak.
This may retrospectively prove to be the point at which cracks in the record business split into deep fissures.
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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/music/mus...k-charts-adele
Poor music industry! The Queen her power destroyed it.
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The Adeles are coming back to slay together yet again 
