According to the Official Charts Company’s year-end sales data, published today by British recorded music trade body The BPI, 2013 was the year of the Million Sellers! Four singles released during the last twelve months have crossed over this landmark sales threshold, creating the biggest annual haul of million-selling singles since 1998.
Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines FT TI and Pharrell Williams was the biggest selling single of 2013, clocking up sales of more than 1.47 million copies since it debuted at Number 1 on the Official Singles Chart back in June. It spent five non-consecutive weeks at the top spot, and is also the longest running Number 1 of 2013.
Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, which became the first single released in 2013 to reach a million sales and the French dance duo’s first ever UK chart topper, is at Number 2 in the year-end Top 40. Get Lucky, which also features Pharrell Williamsalongside legendary Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers, reached one million sales on its 69th day of release in the UK. It ends the year with a sales tally of more then 1.3 million copies. CONTINUE READING
From Steve Stoute:
Last week, two of the biggest names in music shocked their fans with bold moves through digital media: Long-time digital music holdouts Led Zeppelin announced that they would finally release their catalogue to the masses via Spotify, while Beyoncé, without warning, unleashed her 14-song, 17-video self-titled album on iTunes. One of these events represents the future of music as a business, while the other retreads an already-broken model.
The Spotify/Led Zeppelin deal, unfortunately, represents the latter. Spotify, like Pandora, is still attempting to substantiate a business model that gives music away for free to a vast majority of its listeners. While each service has some small percentage of paid subscribers, their entire business model has so far relied on advertisers to underwrite a majority of their costs. Telling every Spotify user in the world that they will now be able to access the entire catalogue of one of the most popular music acts in history for free is only reinforcing this discredited model; once you train consumers that your product is free, it is very hard, if not impossible, to convert them to a paid model. CONTINUE READING
If you write songs, and your songs are sold, downloaded, streamed or used in many other ways, they’re generating songwriter royalties for you. Awesome, right?
Nowadays, the types of songwriter royalties earned fall into two buckets: Physical/Analog Songwriter Royalties (generated from old school music industry), and Digital Songwriter Royalties (generated from the modern digital music industry). With all of the different ways your compositions can be used in both industry models, there’s a good chance your songs are generating money you’re not even aware of, which means you’re missing out on collecting your money, and that ain’t cool. So, to make sure that stops now, we’ve outlined 13 ways that your songs make you money.
But one note before we begin: each income stream and type of royalty explained below is generated from both the original recording of a song or “composition” (i.e. the Beatles’ version of “Yesterday”), and off of a cover of the song. CONTINUE READING
From the NYPost:
It’s already known as ARTFLOP.
On Nov. 6, amid the kind of hype not seen since Michael Jackson floated a statue of himself down the Thames River, Lady Gaga released her third studio album, “ARTPOP.”
And not since Jackson has such a globally famous, white-hot pop star had such a rise and precipitous fall: “ARTPOP” is on track to lose $25 million for her label, Interscope, prompting rumors of imminent layoffs.
But it’s not just album sales. When Gaga opened this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, her performance was eclipsed by the twerking Miley Cyrus. Gaga’s work as both host and performer on a recent “Saturday Night Live” was underwhelming, and her recent ABC special, “Lady Gaga & The Muppets’ Holiday Spectacular,” had a dismal 0.9 rating among viewers ages 18 to 49, with just 3.6 million viewers total.
“That ‘Applause’ Gaga is hearing these days has been reduced to a polite golf-clap,” said The Wrap, referring to the title of her first single from the album. CONTINUE READING
This must hurt. “The X Factor” is just not doing well. We all know it. But on Wednesday night there was an added insult: Kelly Clarkson’s Christmas special had more total viewers than Simon Cowell’s competition. The irony of course is that Clarkson was discovered on Cowell’s “American Idol” and was the very first winner of that show.
“X Factor” was the eleventh–yes 11th– most watched show on Wednesday night. That’s also rough news. From 8 to 10 pm “X Factor” had 4.97 million viewers. It was up against another singing competition on NBC called “The Sing Off.” That show had 6.03 million viewers. Ouch!
Later on NBC, Clarkson’s Christmas special came on at 10pm and scored 5.31 mil viewers. Indeed, if you take away the shows on the almost non existent CW network, “X Factor” had the lowest total audience of any show on Wednesday night.
The people at “American Idol” had better be watching this news. If they haven’t made severe changes for the upcoming season, they’re going to be in the same predicament.
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