Our poll this week asks whether airplay or sales chart reporting has an impact on your music purchases.
Here at Bluegrass Today, we publish both a weekly and a monthly chart that measures how often new bluegrass songs get played on the radio. Other publications, like Billboard, publish charts based on sales reported to Soundscan, and still others measure how popular new songs are with radio programmers.
How about your personal buying habits – does chart action affect your decision-making?
With the books now closed on 2006, Nielson Soundscan is reporting the figures for physical sale of CDs and internet purchases of downloaded music in 2006.
CD sales in the United States fell by 4.9% from last year’s numbers. The total number of units sold for 2006 was 588.2 million and that includes CDs and downloads. In 2005 the number was 618.9 million. During this same period physical album sales on the internet rose to 29.4 million units, which is an increase of 19%. Digital album downloads increased by 101 percent to 32.6 million units.
The physical sale of CDs through brick and mortar record stores seems to be the casualty in all this. That fact was underscored last year by the closing of Tower Records.
While I did find the country genre sales figures (74.9 million units), I couldn’t find any numbers specific to bluegrass music. I know Soundscan has a bluegrass chart, but I couldn’t find sales numbers for the genre. I’d be curious to know. If anyone has that information please share it with us.
October 1st marked the end of the third quarter of the year and Nielsen SoundScan has released sales figures for the year to date (not available online). Physical album sales decreased slightly from last year to 370.5 million units. That’s down 8.3 percent from the 404.2 million sold this time last year. While digital album sales are nowhere near that large, they did increase by 115 percent over last year with a total of 22.6 million sold. That’s entire album downloads. Single track downloads also increased 72 percent for a total of 418.6 million tracks downloaded.
If you figure that 10 tracks equals one album equivalent then the total number of digital album sales could be said to be 64.4 million. This means that digital downloads accounted for nearly 20 percent of music sales so far this year. I expect that will increase during the fourth quarter due to gift cards purchased during the holiday season.
Adding digital sales and physical sales together I come up with a total of 434.9 million albums sold so far in 2006. The figure for this time last year was a bit higher at 439.2 million. That’s a decrease of just over 1 percent. Probably just a minor fluctuation and nothing for the industry to worry about.
Where bluegrass album sales fit into this larger picture is unclear as I don’t have genre specific data.
People in the biz have been predicting great things for this family band, who just recently released their debut release for Skaggs Family Records. Their stage presentation is dynamic and engaging, and the four siblings have been developing into legitimate talents with a flair for performing.
Mom and dad (Sandy and Jere), along with the “kids” (Cia, Skip, BJ and Molly), have been traveling the road as a full time band for several years, winning fans and building an audience along the way. Now, they play between 250-300 dates every year, so getting to see Cherryholmes won’t be a difficult thing to do.
Now it appears that these predictions are starting to be realized, as just one week after its release, Cherryholmes is set to debut on the Billboard Magazine Bluegrass chart at #3. This chart is based solely on direct sales, and the ranking is derived from Neilsen’s SoundScan results. The chart results are not available online.
Cia told me last week that she had just heard that the CD shipped over 1,000 units in the first few days. That may not be big news in the commercial pop music world, but it matters greatly in bluegrass especially for a relatively new act.
Congratulations to the Cherryholmes Family for this exciting news from Billboard.
What More Should I Say, the most recent Pinecastle release for Michelle Nixon & Drive, debuted this week on the Billboard Magazine bluegrass chart at #46. This chart is compiled using Soundscan reports, a service of the Nielsen Company – the same folks who compile viewer data for television and radio broadcasting.
Soundscan compiles their data based on the actual sale of CDs at over 14,000 retailers in the US and Canada, using the bar code scan at the register (hence the name). Of particular interest to bluegrass artists and labels, Soundscan also allows bands who sell directly to consumers at their shows to report those sales to Nielsen via a portable hand held scanner. There is no cost to submit a title to Soundscan, but obtaining the reports requires a hefty subscription fee, which may be the reason why only a few bluegrass-oriented record companies are taking advantage of the service.
