Amid Sales Slump, Artists Find 'More Ways To Monetize Music' - Article From USAToday.com

Album sales continue to slide, and once-booming digital sales are flat, but there are bright footnotes in the recording industry's gloomy 2010 midyear sales summary.

Consumers bought 148.4 million albums (both physical product and downloadable delivery) through June 27, down 11% from the 166 million sold to this point a year ago, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Digital sales, on a steady growth streak since 2004, have hit a plateau. Sales stand at 576 million this year, roughly equal to 2009's midway total of 575.7 million. At this point in 2009, tracks were 6% ahead of 2008.

In 2001, the first year of declining sales in the piracy era, fans scooped up 331.4 million albums by the end of June, 123% more than the equivalent period this year.

The asterisk?

 

"With so many different options in terms of how consumers obtain and experience music, albums aren't the only game in town anymore," says Keith Caulfield, Billboard chart analyst. "Because the album was the dominant format for decades, people became accustomed to quoting album sales as an indicator of how well the music industry was faring.

 

"Now there are multiple ways of measuring music's popularity and sales. It's hard to keep tabs on how much money Lady Gaga is earning from having her songs in Glee. There are so many more ways to monetize music. Albums don't tell the whole story."

 

Flattening digital sales might be explained by dwindling new adopters and a widening mobile-device landscape.

"In digital, iTunes is king, and nobody's talking about a new iPod," Caulfield says. "Apple's expanded to iPhones, iTouches and iPads, and music is a slice of a larger picture."

 

A few blockbusters are bucking the trend of lower sales and expectations. Lady Antebellum's Need You Now leads the album pack this year with 2.3 million copies sold in 22 weeks. Its secret? Broad appeal.

 

The title track is "a perfect single, at that place where pop, country and adult contemporary meet," says veteran pop-music analyst Paul Grein, who writes the Chart Watch blog for Yahoo. "It will be the record to beat at the Grammy Awards."

 

Justin Bieber's My World 2.0 is second, trailed by Sade's Soldier of Love and Lady Gaga's The Fame. Eminem's Recovery, which sold 741,000 copies its first week, will move into fifth place with second-week sales projected to push his total past 1 million.

 

Eminem had "the strongest first-week showing in 20 months," Grein says. "I was starting to think we wouldn't see those kind of numbers again. And in just three weeks (of sales), Drake will be over 700,000 and rank No. 10 for the year. Those are encouraging numbers."

 

Hip-hop also plays a leading role in several of the year's biggest-selling songs. Of the top 20, 11 are collaborations, most with rappers, "which shows how ingrained that sound has become in popular music," Grein says. B.o.B's Nothin' On You featuring Bruno Mars or Bieber's Baby featuring Ludacris "would not have been as successful without the rap element. Hip-hop gave them an edge in the current market. Even Katy Perry's California Gurls works better with Snoop Dogg's rap."

 

Top songs so far, in descending order: Train's Hey, Soul Sister, Black Eyed Peas' Imma Be, Lady Antebellum's Need You Now, Ke$ha's TiK ToK and Usher's OMG.

Pop's dominance in the top five "make sense, since young fans are the ones buying songs," Grein says.