Lily Allen has said she feels record companies are scared of taking risks on experimental artists.
Speaking to NME in this week’s issue, which is on newsstands or available digitallynow, the singer says record labels are veering towards picking safe, “watered-down” music when choosing singles to release.
“What pisses me off about music right now is the lack of support for being experimental and brave,” she said. “People just want to be formulaic and predictable. Record companies and A&R people are just absolutely terrified of taking risks at the moment – and that’s quite frustrating as an artist, when it comes to picking singles, because they only ever want to go for the watered-down stuff.”
This causes frustration for artists, she continues, when only more commercially-driven music is released. She added: “I’m not saying that those songs can’t have a good pop sensibility about them, but personally, I like to think of myself as being something a little bit more than that. It’s sad to watch the tracks that I think are stronger having to sit back on the album while the poppier, more commercial ones are driving it.”
Allen went to Number One in 2013 with a cover of Keane‘s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ and Number Nine with her comeback single proper ‘Hard Out Here’. She is yet to announce full details of her third album, which she previously told NME will be released in 2014
[NME]
Nielsen & Billboard have released 2013′s U.S. music report, a report analyzing data for the year in music.
According to the data presented in the report, overall music streams have increased from 2012, with 118.1 billion streams in 2013, a 32 percent increase from the previous year.
Overall music sales have decreased 6.3 percent, according to Nielsen & Billboard, from 1,661 million in 2012 to 1,556 million in 2013. Total album sales have also decreased 8 percent, from 316 million in 2012 to 289.4 million in 2013.
An increase was reported with vinyl sales, as figures increased by 33 percent from 4.6 million in 2012 to 6.1 million in 2013. Meanwhile, CD sales dropped 14 percent from 193 million to 165 million.
Justin Timberlake had the biggest album-debut week of the year, with 20/20 Experience opening with 968,000 units in its first week. The album also was the highest-selling album of the year with 2.4 million copies sold. His two albums, 20/20 Experience and 20/20 Experience Complete, combined to sell more than 3.2 million units in 2013, according to Nielsen & Billboard.
Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2 had the second-biggest album debut week of the year, with 792,000 units sold in its first week. The album, which sold 1.7 million copies in 2013, was one of four Eminem releases to make the Top 200 best-selling albums of 2013. Recovery sold 169,000 units in 2013, The Eminem Show did 165,000 units and Curtain Call sold 145,000 copies for the year. The releases were #s 164, 175 and 189 for the year, respectively.
Billboard Magazine recently posted the Nielsen Soundscan year-end 2013 music sales numbers, and while they may not correspond exactly with the upcoming figures from the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) or IFPI (International Federation of the Phonograph Industry), I don’t think they’re far off the mark. I’m sure music execs everywhere are looking at the stats and wringing their hands, and in some ways, they should be, because it’s the first year since iTunes was introduced that digital music has suffered a decline.
In what should be a huge red flag for the industry, 2013 digital track sales fell 5.7% from 1.34 billion units to 1.26 billion. Soundscan hasn’t yet released their streaming numbers for the year, but it should be clear to everyone that streaming is the reason for the downturn. In fact, it’s been widely noted that the digital download sales decline has been offset by the rise in streaming income, which we should see quantified when the numbers are made available.
Perhaps a larger problem is that the album, the cash cow of the industry (although less so than ever), has seen its sales decline for yet another year. Album sales for 2014 dipped to 289.4 million units, an 8.4% reduction from the prior year, although digital album sales fell a nominal 0.1% to 117.6 units from the previous year’s 117.7 million.
We’re in the era of the single song, as albums mean less and less to today’s consumers. It’s a different time where the attention span is much shorter, multitasking abounds, and there are more media choices than ever, which are less than ideal conditions for a medium that requires a long time commitment. Albums won’t die, but hopefully they’ll be altered for the times, with fewer songs and less running time. That’s not going to bring the format back to prominence, but it might slow its decline. This is one time where quality trumps quantity for sure.
“Of course we all knew that CD sales would fall again, the question was only by how much.”
Of course we all knew that CD sales would fall again, the question was only by how much. Last year the sales of that round piece of shinny plastic was down 14.5% to 165.4 million units. Keep in mind that these were only the units that Soundscan could count. The number of CDs that are directly sold by artists at gigs, events and online is unknown and could easily push that total considerably higher.
But who’s selling these albums? In the end, it’s still the same players, but the marketshare has shifted a bit. iTunes gained slightly to 40.6% last year, while the big retailers Target and Walmart declined to around 27%, Best Buy and Trans World to 13.5%, and mom and pop retailers down to 6.3%. Non-traditional retailers like Amazon and Starbucks are the only ones that saw an increase to 12.6%.
About the only format besides streaming that showed any growth was the vinyl LP, which grew last year by 32% from 4.55 million units to 6 million units. Save your cheering though, since those numbers, while now about 2% of all album sales, are still insignificant to the industry at large. No matter how much growth the format shows, vinyl will not energize the business.
“While people don’t need music to live, they need it all the same.”
So should the music industry be worried? In a word, no. While people don’t need music to live, they need it all the same. It’s in our DNA and we’re always going to consume it in one form or another. What we see now is the business morphing as music streaming becomes the consumption method of choice for listeners. It seems like just yesterday we were living through the first digital music revolution; keep your eyes open because we’re living it again.
Believe it or not, a new drug has been developed that helps you achieve perfect pitch. A new study published in Frontiers shows that the FDA-approved drug Valproate, which is normally used as an anticonvulsant and mood stabilizer for epilepsy, anorexia, migraine, and post traumatic stress disorder, really has such a unique unexpected affect.
Researchers from the US, the UK, Canada and France gave the drug to adult men who were then able to identify pitches they couldn’t previously, after first experimenting on mice. Now how they could tell if the mice had perfect pitch is beyond me, but the human tests seem pretty impressive.
In case you’re wondering, perfect pitch (absolute pitch is the scientific term) is the ability to identify a musical pitch without a reference point, and only .01% of the general population has it. It’s also been discovered that it’s usually acquired by those who begin musical training by age 6, although it can be genetically transmitted as well.
Valproate is like most drugs in that it does have some unpleasant side effects unfortunately. Users can suffer from tiredness, tremor, sedation, gastrointestinal disturbances, and about 10% experience reversible hair loss.
So now the question – Would you take a drug that would give you perfect pitch, given the potential side effects?
As the current year slowly grinds to a soft and mellow halt, it’s a good time to gaze into the crystal ball to see what possibilities the music business might have in store for us in 2014. Here are nine predictions for the upcoming year (in no particular order) that are anything but safe, but are still based on the events that 2013 bestowed upon us.
1. The tipping point finally comes for streaming music. Users discover the convenience of streaming as more and more convert to paid subscriptions. New streaming services cause confusion in the marketplace at first, but there are clear winners and losers by the end of the year.
2. Spotify turns a profit. The company fights off advances from new and old competition alike as it expands its global footprint and increases its active users. The service finally becomes barely profitable by year’s end.
3. Musicians earn more, complain less. As the number of streaming users grow, artists and songwriters discover that those hundredths of a cent payments are actually adding up into real money. Plus, with new streaming services coming online, money flows from more sources than before, causing more smiles than frowns.
4. And they concentrate on YouTube. Record labels discovered YouTube as a revenue source in 2013, musicians and songwriters discover it in 2014, as they monetize their channels either manually or via multichannel networks, and post more videos in order to create a new revenue stream.
5. The major labels hire out their services. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis set the precedent of hiring the radio promo services of Warner Music Group for a small piece of the action. In 2014, more indie artists will try the same strategy as major labels decide that a small piece of the pie is better than none.
6. Las Vegas music residencies run their course. Britney Spears brings an end to the trend as she starts out strong, then falters badly, making artists and casinos alike think twice about giving it a try in the future.
7. One indie label starts to look like a new major. An indie label will gather enough market strength to begin the challenge for the title of the fourth major label. The three existing major labels take their eye off the ball with their own artists in order to fight the new threat, leaving open the door for even more competition from other indie labels that grow larger by the month.
8. Musicians online marketing expands to new platforms and away from old. Acts that cater to a sub-age 21 audience switch their efforts away from Facebook and Twitter to lessor known networks like Snapchat, Instagram, Ask.fm, WeChat, and Vine to follow their audiences. The major social networks continue to grow steadily in the first half of the year, but seem like they’ve peaked by the end.
9. The next new trend in music surfaces. While EDM stays strong with its core audience, it’s influence on music begins to decrease as the next trend in music starts to take hold toward the end of the year. As always, the trend begins underground and gestates, but comes to the public forefront more quickly than usual, as artists who’s careers are based on older genres see their popularity begin to wane in favor of the latest flavor.
Yes, some of these predictions are far out, but more than you think actually have a chance of occurring. Crystal balls are always somewhat foggy, and they’re difficult to successfully gaze even with glasses (or Google GOOG -0.81% Glass for that matter). We’ll just have to wait until this time next year to see how these predictions turn out.
