StillFaggyAF
New member
New Standards For Commercial Success
I think it’s time for some totally new metrics altogether. Rappers and their labels are always bragging about their platinum and gold sales, despite all of the concrete data we have proving people are no longer interested in buying physical albums. After doing a little bit of digging, it seems fairly easy to fudge the numbers. The Recording Industry Association of America created the concepts of gold (500,000 copies sold) and platinum (1 million copies sold) in 1958. It’s safe to say a lot has changed in the 55 years since then, yet we’re all hanging on to this outdated standard. Additionally, labels and artists can use club sales and “club free goods” to count towards their certification tallies. These club free goods are often albums or singles shipped to retailers for free, and sometimes they can account for up to 15% of the total sales of an album. So when a rapper is posing on Instagram with his platinum plaque in the background, and you feel something just doesn’t add up, you’re probably right.
“Digital albums are sort of a stopgap in the meantime—just like iTunes—but I think we’re still progressing towards something else,” offers Dirty Swift. “Who knows what that is? I think at the moment, there’s really no other way to measure it, so you have to keep those things in place. But in 10 years, I don’t know. Are albums gonna be albums anymore? I don’t know if we’ll still be doing albums the way we’re doing them now. They may be something different. At that point you may need to reevaluate what success is and what it isn’t when you award something. There are things that exist now that didn’t exist 10 years ago, like phone apps. Five years ago, what was Instagram or Twitter? In 10 years, who knows what’s gonna be around and how people are gonna be consuming music?”
This may explain the heavy use of Nielsen SoundScan figures instead of the RIAA’s. Nielsen SoundScan is a wholly different entity from the RIAA, and they also provide weekly sales reports. The SoundScan numbers are a step in the right direction, but again, physical sales don’t really reflect the current marketplace. As long as they’re not signed to a 360 deal, artists can always count on touring as a good way to generate revenue. And with the advent of subscription services such as Spotify, listeners aren’t really paying to own physical copies of music. They’re paying for access to music via a subscription. The Federal Court battle between Interscope (also under the UMG umbrella) and F.B.T. Productions over Eminem’s digital royalties underscores that we’re still in the process of redefining success in the Digital Era.
What Major Labels Aren’t Telling Us
In the meantime, we’re how labels can spin the concept of a “Number One” album. In May of 2010, we heard a lot of talk about B.o.B.’s number one debut, The Adventures Of Bobby Ray. In a convenient bit of record industry spin, what we didn’t hear was how the 84,000 copies sold made it the lowest sales total for a number one album since Chrisette Michele’s Epiphany registered 83,000 the previous year. While B.o.B. earned his gold certification and number one debut without any shady business tactics, recording industry veteran, Tom Silverman of Tommy Boy Records, explained how labels can easily resort to less scrupulous means to lock down a more favorable spot on the charts.
“People are telling me that the majors have teams of people who actually buy singles on iTunes to try to drive it up the charts—buying their own songs,” Silverman told Wired.com in a 2010 interview. “It blew my mind. I mean, we’re not learning anything. So if they buy 50,000 songs, we’re talking $50,000 less 70 percent, so it would cost about $15,000. For $15,000 in a week, they can buy 50,000 more song downloads, which could drive the record up three or four positions on the chart. And the hype of it all would make people believe it, and then the next week it would be real, which is what always used to happen.”
Again, my stating that numbers can be manipulated and record companies often lie isn’t exactly a groundbreaking opinion. But the larger question is, after decades of using the same old standard, why isn’t anyone in or outside of the industry proposing a new metric for how we measure commercial success?
Winning With Increased Revenue Streams
The impact of licensing deals, merchandise sales and touring income are a few things we rarely see on the charts. I think if we’re going to reduce artists to numbers on a spreadsheet and only compare their monetary impact, we may as well level the playing field. Why continue to use an outdated metric like record sales, when the average major label recording deal only gives artists a small percentage of those sometimes inflated sales figures anyway? Artists, such as Frank Ocean, Theophilus London and Cee Lo Green are licensing their songs to various sitcoms and television shows. A recent episode of the WB drama “Gossip Girl” included no less than five tracks from Ocean’s Channel Orange album. While Theophilus London got some exposure to the teenie-bopper demographic when two of his tracks were used in an episode of “90210.” As it currently stands, there’s no way to measure that kind of engagement.
I think major corporations will always find ways to manipulate data to their advantage. And if an artists opts to do business with one of the big three record labels, they can more or less expect to be treated like chattel. But in an age where we can access a wealth of statistical data at the click of a mouse, independent artists can have much more of a say over their financial future. And a return to the good old, boom bap days of artists refusing to get in bed with major corporations is out of the question. If we’re really going to measure an emcee’s success by the bottom line, we should take all the available data into account.
I think it’s time for some totally new metrics altogether. Rappers and their labels are always bragging about their platinum and gold sales, despite all of the concrete data we have proving people are no longer interested in buying physical albums. After doing a little bit of digging, it seems fairly easy to fudge the numbers. The Recording Industry Association of America created the concepts of gold (500,000 copies sold) and platinum (1 million copies sold) in 1958. It’s safe to say a lot has changed in the 55 years since then, yet we’re all hanging on to this outdated standard. Additionally, labels and artists can use club sales and “club free goods” to count towards their certification tallies. These club free goods are often albums or singles shipped to retailers for free, and sometimes they can account for up to 15% of the total sales of an album. So when a rapper is posing on Instagram with his platinum plaque in the background, and you feel something just doesn’t add up, you’re probably right.
“Digital albums are sort of a stopgap in the meantime—just like iTunes—but I think we’re still progressing towards something else,” offers Dirty Swift. “Who knows what that is? I think at the moment, there’s really no other way to measure it, so you have to keep those things in place. But in 10 years, I don’t know. Are albums gonna be albums anymore? I don’t know if we’ll still be doing albums the way we’re doing them now. They may be something different. At that point you may need to reevaluate what success is and what it isn’t when you award something. There are things that exist now that didn’t exist 10 years ago, like phone apps. Five years ago, what was Instagram or Twitter? In 10 years, who knows what’s gonna be around and how people are gonna be consuming music?”
This may explain the heavy use of Nielsen SoundScan figures instead of the RIAA’s. Nielsen SoundScan is a wholly different entity from the RIAA, and they also provide weekly sales reports. The SoundScan numbers are a step in the right direction, but again, physical sales don’t really reflect the current marketplace. As long as they’re not signed to a 360 deal, artists can always count on touring as a good way to generate revenue. And with the advent of subscription services such as Spotify, listeners aren’t really paying to own physical copies of music. They’re paying for access to music via a subscription. The Federal Court battle between Interscope (also under the UMG umbrella) and F.B.T. Productions over Eminem’s digital royalties underscores that we’re still in the process of redefining success in the Digital Era.
What Major Labels Aren’t Telling Us
In the meantime, we’re how labels can spin the concept of a “Number One” album. In May of 2010, we heard a lot of talk about B.o.B.’s number one debut, The Adventures Of Bobby Ray. In a convenient bit of record industry spin, what we didn’t hear was how the 84,000 copies sold made it the lowest sales total for a number one album since Chrisette Michele’s Epiphany registered 83,000 the previous year. While B.o.B. earned his gold certification and number one debut without any shady business tactics, recording industry veteran, Tom Silverman of Tommy Boy Records, explained how labels can easily resort to less scrupulous means to lock down a more favorable spot on the charts.
“People are telling me that the majors have teams of people who actually buy singles on iTunes to try to drive it up the charts—buying their own songs,” Silverman told Wired.com in a 2010 interview. “It blew my mind. I mean, we’re not learning anything. So if they buy 50,000 songs, we’re talking $50,000 less 70 percent, so it would cost about $15,000. For $15,000 in a week, they can buy 50,000 more song downloads, which could drive the record up three or four positions on the chart. And the hype of it all would make people believe it, and then the next week it would be real, which is what always used to happen.”
Again, my stating that numbers can be manipulated and record companies often lie isn’t exactly a groundbreaking opinion. But the larger question is, after decades of using the same old standard, why isn’t anyone in or outside of the industry proposing a new metric for how we measure commercial success?
Winning With Increased Revenue Streams
The impact of licensing deals, merchandise sales and touring income are a few things we rarely see on the charts. I think if we’re going to reduce artists to numbers on a spreadsheet and only compare their monetary impact, we may as well level the playing field. Why continue to use an outdated metric like record sales, when the average major label recording deal only gives artists a small percentage of those sometimes inflated sales figures anyway? Artists, such as Frank Ocean, Theophilus London and Cee Lo Green are licensing their songs to various sitcoms and television shows. A recent episode of the WB drama “Gossip Girl” included no less than five tracks from Ocean’s Channel Orange album. While Theophilus London got some exposure to the teenie-bopper demographic when two of his tracks were used in an episode of “90210.” As it currently stands, there’s no way to measure that kind of engagement.
I think major corporations will always find ways to manipulate data to their advantage. And if an artists opts to do business with one of the big three record labels, they can more or less expect to be treated like chattel. But in an age where we can access a wealth of statistical data at the click of a mouse, independent artists can have much more of a say over their financial future. And a return to the good old, boom bap days of artists refusing to get in bed with major corporations is out of the question. If we’re really going to measure an emcee’s success by the bottom line, we should take all the available data into account.
