Head music down by 20%, Tail flat

An interesting piece from Music Week in the UK. Sub required, but here's the meat of the article: (thanks to Will Page for the link)

Long-tail helps niche albums
23 April 2007

The so-called “long-tail” impact on the singles market, since the introduction of legal downloads, is starting to reach the albums business, according to new Music Week research.

MW’s detailed study of quarter one trading patterns indicates that, while sales of the Top 200 sellers plummeted year-on-year by more than 20%, the rest of the market dropped by little more than 3%. It indicates that, as the top titles suffer the biggest falls in a clearly tough market, sales are being spread out more widely across a greater number of titles.

The apparent trend is being warmly received by labels and retailers alike, coming after a challenging opening three months of 2007 when artist albums were 8.94% down on Q1 2006, despite having had the added benefit of download album sales. These were not added to OCC sales figures until quarter two last year.

The drop was led by disastrous sales of the Top 200 artist albums, whose total of 11.29m physical units in the 13-week period was 21.13% lower than the first quarter of 2006.

Further down the chart, however, it was a different story, with sales of wider catalogue remaining relatively healthy. Excluding the top 200 best sellers, 13.10m physical artist albums were sold in the first quarter of 2007, down just 3.33% on a similar total for Q1 2006.

Furthermore, OCC data indicates that, despite the generally poor state of the artist albums market, sales of the 5,001st to 9,999th best-selling artist albums in Q1 2007 increased 11.82% year-on-year.

This comparatively robust performance, suggests Universal commercial director Brian Rose, is partly due to the falling price of chart CDs, which has forced many retailers to shift away from chart albums.

“Because there are thinner margins on chart, retailers are being forced to work campaigns even harder and getting better at it,” Rose says. “It’s either price-driven or people are giving more space to promotions.”

Rose adds that the rise may also be influenced by the growth in online retailers, which can offer a far wider range of product than physical stores – Play.com, for example, aims to offer all available UK catalogue albums by April and Amazon.co.uk already provides more than 1m different titles.

“We have grown and grown our catalogue business,” says Play.com head of music Helen Marquis. “We have had growth just by expanding the catalogue.”

 

Comments

[Mary Warner]

Here's hoping this happens to the publishing industry soon. Maybe this trend will blast top ten lists and we'll have popular mid-list tens, or some such on down the long tail.

[Peter Kohan]

Despite the demand for music products and services we are seeing most physical CD titles sold at big box stores - http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB117763890447584360.html (subscription required) - who ARE NOT expanding their inventories stateside.

Consumers who want these goods will soon be FORCED to buy most CDs online because retailers can't justify losing money on selling a wide variety of CDs. If you expect to see catalog reissues at any physical retailer in the near future think again. You'll seee plenty of greatest hits albums, but just the tiniest fraction of full album reissues. And when that happens how long before the labels take a lot of those albums out of print? Online retail might help staunch the bleeding there, but the labels won't keep slow sellers in print for long, and they will be loathe to inject even more titles to budget price status.

[Justin Long]

I wonder what the effect of piracy actually is on the Long Tail. For example, many of the niche music that is being sold at $1/track cannot be found on P2P music networks. It's just too niche to be shared widely. On the other hand, the thing that is MOST shared is the "hits." Maybe its better to be a master at being cheap, good, and too niche to be pirateable.

[Peter Kohan]

Re: Justin's comment from 5/22

What is really fascinating is that as it becomes harder for the record industry to produce major, break-out hits it also becomes both easier and harder to find quality music either on P2P services, MySpace, and any other of the myriad number of ways to discover music on the Internet these days. Easier, in that once you know about something hot it's easy to locate, but if you're just searching randomly for good music, then you have as much shot at finding it as any A&R rep looking for the "next big thing." We all want our own, personal "next big things," and we even want to commune with like fans of that act, but first we have to find that act(s) before we invest our time and energy into it.

That's the one thing that is under-examined in looking at so many trends in consumer's buying habits. So often the demands on our TIME are so restrictive in what we are actually able to accomplish. We have unlimited choice of music, but once you get kids do you have any time to search for it casually? If you commute by car in California to a job do you have any other time to do anything else in your life other than sit in traffic? These are real issues that affect buying decisions.

[kabin]

thanks...
Kabin
Konteyner