Adele is set to sell another 155k CD’s this week and has no signs of slowing down. Adele recently told a magazine that she never thought her latest CD would have such an impact.

“I was saying, “I don’t think this record is going to do anything. I can’t feel the buzz in America,”‘ she said.

Rob Stringer, CEO of Columbia Records was quite surprised as well.

‘When everybody heard the record, they knew it was special,’ he told the magazine. ‘But not one person could honestly tell you they thought it would sell this many.’

It’s hard to predict the sales of artists today with the changing variables and moving parts.

Lionel Richie, sold 200,000 copies of his “Tuskegee” album, his best debut in 20 years. Madonna‘s “MDNA” album is expected be the number 1 album in the country this week – the final numbers will come in later today. Unlike Lionel Richie, Madonna will bundle album with ticket sales to lock down the number 1 spot.

It turns out that a hefty number of “MDNA” albums weren’t sold the usual way. Madonna’s label, Interscope, and Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, bundled the album with her ticket sales. For every ticket sold online to Madonna’s upcoming shows, purchasers automatically receive a copy of “MDNA.” They get a link to a free purchase on ITunes, or they can send in their mailing address for a physical CD. It doesn’t matter if the concert ticket is $52 or $350. It’s a smart marketing move for Interscope. It unnaturally inflates sales, and uses “MDNA” for what albums have become–souvenirs, or loss leaders. (Forbes)

Is it fair to artists on the chart who didn’t “bundle”?

Last year, retailers and others objected when amazon.com did a 99 cent promotion with Lady Gaga for her “Born this Way” album. But Interscope (again Interscope) sold their bulk of CDs in first two weeks. The amazon promotion inflated Gaga’s sales by 440,000 copies to 1.1 million. And then sales tapered off. The Richie album, by the way, is “hot.” So the real test will be whether “MDNA” has legs beyond the promotion.

The New Yorker published an article titled ‘The Song Machine, The hit makers behind Rihanna’.

Most of the songs played on Top Forty radio are collaborations between producers like Stargate and “top line” writers like Ester Dean who has written smash hooks for Rihanna and Nicki Minaj.

Ester Dean has a genius for infectious hooks.

Among Dean’s best hooks are her three Rihanna smashes—“Rude Boy” (“Come on, rude boy, boy, can you get it up / Come on, rude boy, boy, is you big enough?”), “S&M” (“Na-na-na-na COME ON”), and “What’s My Name” (“Oh, na-na, what’s my name?”), all with backing tracks by Stargate—and her work on two Nicki Minaj smashes, “Super Bass” (“Boom, badoom, boom / boom, badoom, boom / bass / yeah, that’s that super bass”) and David Guetta’s “Turn Me On” (“Make me come alive, come on and turn me on”).

Things slowed down when people got fed up with Stargate’s sound..

In 2004, things suddenly slowed down for Stargate in the U.K. “People got fed up with Stargate’s sound—things change fast in the music business—and there was no work,” Eriksen told me. “We were sitting back in Norway wondering, What do we do now? Should we shut it down? Our manager, Tim, said, ‘Let’s just go to New York, book a studio, and give it a shot there.’ We didn’t have much money left, but we paid for the trip. No one here knew who we were. We had a few sessions with writers, but nothing substantial. Our goal was to sell one song, and we did, we sold one, so we came back for one more week of sessions, and then we were going to call it quits.”

Today, hit songs are mainly composed by 3 people and it must contain hook after hook.

The producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the “synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical phrases that lock you into the song. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, the president of Roc Nation, and Dean’s manager, told me recently. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre-chorus, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge.” The reason, he explained, is that “people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.

Read the rest of the article here

Although dance-pop hit its peak, it still has signs of life.

One Direction has made Billboard history. The British boy band topped the Billboard 200 chart with their debut album “Up All Night,” making them the first UK group to debut at No. 1 with their debut album. The album topped both Bruce Springsteen’s “Wrecking Ball” and Adele’s “21.”

and they debuted with 176,000 albums sold…

“Up All Night” debuted on the charts with 176,000 units sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan. One Direction bested the previous record set by pop group the Spice Girls in 1997 when their debut album “Spice” entered the charts at No. 6. One Direction’s single “What Makes You Beautiful” entered the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart at No. 28, which also marked the highest debut for a UK group since the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” debuted at No. 11 in 1997.

In case you haven’t heard of the band, they were created from ‘The X Factor’

The boy band was formed on the seventh series of the British singing competition “The X Factor,” after guest judge Nicole Scherzinger made a recommendation to Simon Cowell to put the five solo hopefuls together to compete in the competition as a group act.

Downloading music, movies, e-books and Apps could soon cost Connecticut residents more as lawmakers consider a tax on digital downloads.

The bill, proposed by the General Assembly’s Finance, Review and Bonding Committee, would have consumers pay the 6.35% sales tax on any electronic transfer.

Supporters say the bill would level playing the field. Brick-and-mortar retailers are required to charge a sales tax who purchase products in their stores, why is downloading music from an internet based store exempt?

In fact, 25 states have already begun taxing digital downloads.

The Committee will hold a public hearing about the proposed bill Friday morning at 10am at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford.