Did I miss anything? I feel like come of my stats are def inaccurate but I doubt she'll check.
are there any inconsistencies? I think i got everything I wanted to say out but i want the reader to fully understand whats happening rn and yall are experts.
The main focuses are Madonna, Adele and Taylor
How Streaming Is Taking Over the Music Industry
Music sales, as a whole, are dwindling fast (1). That’s not to be confused with album sales, which hit their absolute peak in the late 90s, and which are also dying, but music sales as a whole: including the sales of singles, albums and music videos combined. In fact, just last year, Australian singer and songwriter Sia, who is responsible for hits like Diamonds by Rihanna and Titanium by David Guetta, topped the Billboard 200 (a chart that tracks the sales of albums in the US) with her fifth studio album with sales less than 50,000 in its release week– an all-time low for a #1 album at the time since Billboard began tracking album and single sales in 1991. Compare that to first week sales of the late 90s – when artists like Britney Spears and NSYNC could push a million albums in a week like it was nothing – and it’s easy to notice the overall decline in sales. A lot of people equate this steady downhill pattern to the industry dying, and while that is a reasonable assumption, it couldn’t be farther from the truth (9).
In 2001, Apple released the first iPod and seemingly overnight, the Digital Revolution was born. iTunes replaced record stores as the world’s #1 music retailer, Walkmans were replaced with iPods and mp3 players (14), and album sales continued to deteriorate. Throughout the rest of the mid 2000s, the Digital Revolution gained more and more traction and single sales continued to grow. Before this pivotal change, single sales were a non-factor. Most people would just buy the parent album to which a single they liked belonged, instead of buying the physical single which would usually only include a couple of songs for a similar price. This placed an extreme importance on albums sales. After the digital era, singles were much cheaper, usually around $1.29, and they were at the touch of your fingertips.
This is why some of the most iconic songs of all time – released somewhere between the 60s and the 90s – cannot compete with the big hits of the 2000s in terms of sales. This is also the same reason why you can’t compare album sales from the 90s to album sales of today – it’s just illogical. Albums released in the “physical” era of music would have much larger sales than albums released during the Digital Revolution, and singles released during the digital era would have much larger sales than those released in the physical era. Madonna is a good example of this. Being the businesswoman she is, Madonna saw this decline in album sales and shift towards singles and took advantage of it. This prompted her to release her now best-selling song worldwide, Hung Up. Notice how her best-selling songs are not necessarily her most memorable songs. Like A Virgin boasts sales of just 3 million worldwide, and some of her other iconic hits sold even less, because of when they were released. Her highest selling albums – True Blue and The Immaculate Collection, both at about 30 million worldwide – were released in the late 80s and early 90s, at the height of her cultural peak. 15 years later, she released Confessions on a Dancefloor, and though its chart run was pretty similar to that of True Blue and The Immaculate Collection, it barely sold 10 million worldwide. The album went #1 in virtually every major music market, like its predecessors, but it didn’t come close to them in terms of sales. Why? The industry is dying, people would cry. But it wasn’t. It was just changing into a more single-oriented market.
But that’s not to say artists still can’t pull huge numbers for both singles and albums. Perhaps the best example of this would be a familiar British singer and songwriter named Adele. As we speak, Adele is breaking records left and right – last month alone, she shattered the record for most downloads of a song in a week with 1.15 million (previously held by Flo Rida’s “Right Round” with 636,000), the record for most views of a music video in 24 hours with 26 million (previously held by Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” with 20.1) as well as the record for fastest song to reach 100 million views on YouTube, which she did in just four short days (previously held by Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” with seven days). The follow up to her sophomore album 21, which broke countless records itself, Is now being stocked in Wal-Marts and Targets across the world, and it seems we are witnessing a moment in music history.
Right now, her third album 25, released last Friday, is set to debut on the Billboard 200 with sales that could go above 3 million, which is absolutely unheard of, especially in this day and age. Even the industry’s most experienced leaders can’t wrap their head around Adele’s colossal success, but I’ll try to put it into perspective by comparing her sales to some other prominent females in pop.
ARTIST ALBUM YEAR FIRST WEEK SALES (US) TOTAL SALES (US)
ADELE 25 2015 3.1 million 3.1 million
ADELE 21 2011 375,000 11.1 million
BEYONCE 4 2011 310,000 1.4 million
BEYONCE BEYONCE 2013 617,000 2.2 million
BRITNEY SPEARS Oops!...I Did It Again 2000 1.319 million 10.4 million
BRITNEY SPEARS Britney 2001 745,000 5 million
KATY PERRY Teenage Dream 2010 192,000 3 million
KATY PERRY PRISM 2013 286,000 1.5 million
LADY GAGA The Fame 2008 24,000 4.7 milion
LADY GAGA Born This Way 2011 1.108 million 2.4 million
TAYLOW SWIFT Fearless 2008 592,000 7 million
TAYLOR SWIFT 1989 2014 1.3 million 5.5 million
As you can see, Adele will easily outsell some of these girls’ total sales with her first week alone, and she should have no problem outselling the rest by the end of the year, with the exception of Oops. This could very well be her second diamond album (an album with 10 million+ sales in the U.S.), and with the steady decline in sales, it could be the last diamond album ever as well. Perhaps the most impressive thing about her success is how effortless it is. She doesn’t need to sell her album for 99 cents to sell a million copies in a week like Lady Gaga did with Born This Way in 2011, she doesn’t need constant discounts and remixes for her singles to go #1 like Katy Perry did with Teenage Dream, and she doesn’t need entire segments of highly publicized awards shows solely dedicated to her like Beyoncé did at the VMAs in 2014, and on several other occasions. (22) Perhaps this doesn’t prove anything about the aforementioned artists, but it does give insight into who Adele really is—the anomaly of the music industry, the outlier, the exception to the rule that everyone else has to follow. She is, to some, the last breath of life the music industry has in it.
But, like I mentioned earlier, the music industry is not dead. In fact, it’s stronger than ever. We are just experiencing a shift in how people consume music, similar to the Digital Revolution in the early 2000s (23). More and more people are switching to free streaming services with ads (like Spotify or Pandora) and paid streaming services (like Apple Music or Spotify Premium)instead of buying the music they want. For a person who listens to a lot of music, paying a flat rate each month for unlimited music is much more cost friendly than buying all the albums you want to listen to. Spotify began to become a household name in Europe around 2010 when it was just starting out. Fast forward to 2014 and streaming has completely taken over Europe. In some countries, Spotify’s native country Sweden for example, streaming accounts for over 70% of music revenue. For the U.S., which is by far the largest music market in the world, streaming’s takeover is a much slower process, but it is still happening all around us.
While streaming has done a lot to combat dying sales and piracy, the takeover of streaming does still pose a few threats. Some believe streaming devalues music, and that if you want to listen to an album, you should have to buy it. This has prompted some artists, most prominently Taylor Swift, to remove their entire catalogues from Spotify in an effort to “take down” streaming. Others believe companies like Spotify doesn’t pay their artists enough, and that the rise of streaming could be a huge hindrance to struggling indie artists trying to breakthrough in a cutthroat industry.
Some people think the efforts of artists like Taylor Swift are valid, while others call her moves calculated. Some people, her fans mainly, believe she does actually care for the wellbeing of the struggling indie artists trying to make ends meet, because she was there herself once, posting her music on Myspace until someone signed her a record deal. Others argue that Taylor Swift only cares about what is best for Taylor Swift (17), as evident by her throwing an unnamed celebrity peer under the bus in her recent video for “Bad Blood”. You can choose either side of that argument, but in reality neither of them is fully right. Taylor Swift might be the biggest pop star on the planet as of late, but she can’t take down Spotify. Jay Z and Beyoncé might be the richest couple alive, but their questionable streaming service “TIDAL” couldn’t take down Spotify.
Even Apple, one of the richest companies in existence with millions of loyal followers across the world, couldn’t make a lasting impact on Spotify as it unveiled its new streaming service Apple Music earlier this year, which begs the question: if a billion dollar company like Apple can’t take down Spotify, who can?
Well, I see it differently. Most people saw Apple Music as a way to attack Spotify – a way to drag iOS users into using their service instead – but to me, it was more damage control than anything. As Apple executives were confronted with the problem of dying iTunes sales and higher streaming numbers, they were faced with two choices: adapt or die. They knew that if they wanted to survive in this changing industry, they would have to adapt or go out of business. And so they did, and the Streaming Revolution was born.
