Bad times for record market in the US

Here are a few of the records you won’t be shopping for in the next week or two: Mariah Carey, Madonna, Green Day, Mary J. Blige, Eve, Usher and Nicole Scherzinger. Some of these — like Green Day and Madonna as well as the Coldplay, U2 and Eminem albums that retailers, labels and fans had on their wish lists — were never really likely to come out this year. But except for Usher, the rest had release dates set for the weeks before Thanksgiving weekend — traditionally the kickoff for holiday shopping. They’ll either arrive in December (Blige) or sometime next year (Scherzinger, Carey, Eve), but what’s usually superstar season in the record business is shaping up as one of the slowest periods in a long time.

It’s slow all over, with The New York Times reporting this fall as one of the worst retail periods in decades. But if sweaters and flat-screen TVs aren’t selling, it’s not because they aren’t in the stores. This year, an unusual number of big releases have drifted further and further back on the calendar, and while of course it’s a gamble to put what is still, after all, an artistic endeavor on a schedule, it’s also strange to release three singles in a four-month period and turn up on magazine covers with no album in sight, which is the case with Pussycat Dolls singer Scherzinger, whose solo debut was slated for October, then November, then December and now February. What’s going on?
Part of the reason is that record releases long ago became like movie openings: The first-week sales are everything, and numbers are trumpeted and analyzed like box-office grosses, talked about on the radio even. (When did sales numbers become something fans cared about?) No one wants a flop, and pop albums are now subject to as much nervous tinkering as big-budget action movies. But other theories abound. One label source theorizes that there’s a hesitancy from labels and artists to put albums out before the next round of layoffs is done (early December is the word, and folks at more than one label compare the hallways to a morgue), because the bloodletting is sure to include personnel setting up those albums. Another suggests that waiting until February, when sales are slow, all but guarantees chart dominance; you lose holiday sales but pick up the Number One spot, and maybe for more than just a week.

Whatever the case, it looks like a dismal finish to a dismal year, with album sales off fourteen percent so far against last year, the biggest drop yet. “This is the worst period for new releases in the history of the music business,” Jim Urie, president of distribution for Universal Music Group, told Rolling Stone — actually, that’s what he said in January about last year, when Justin Timberlake, John Mayer, Gwen Stefani, Beyoncé, OutKast and Christina Aguilera all had fourth-quarter albums in stores. (There was even an Eminem mix tape — remember?) Things are even worse now, and, as Urie went on to point out, when there are no big records, “your fan base has no reason to go to the record store, and they fall out of the habit.” Having lost pretty much an entire generation of consumers in trying to fend off the digital revolution, the labels are now in danger of losing the consumers they have left. For the industry, it’s not dark yet. But it’s getting there.

From an article by Joe Levy, Rolling Stone.