eyecandy1978;2054585 said:Rock music beats rap genre in album and digital sales due to back-catalogue popularity
JIM FARBER
Rap rules the charts, while rock rots on them.
At least that's the popular perception. And looking at the most obvious sales figures, it seems like a sound one.
The top CD last year came from the world of hip hop: Eminem's "Recovery," with over 3.5 million copies moved. The same disk ranks as the hands-down favorite to win all the top Grammys on Sunday, which would give the set a new sales spurt.
More broadly, rap also ranked as the only genre to gain sales in 2010, enjoying a 4% increase, according to figures from SoundScan/Nielsen. Meanwhile, rock suffered a 16% sales decline. Worse, not a single rock album made last year's top 10 CD sales list. (Rap boasts a second CD in that company: Drake's "Thank Me Later," at No. 8.)
In terms of radio play, not a single rock track shows up on the year-end Top Song list. If you look at the current charts, only two rock albums have passed the 1 million sales mark: Daughtry's "Leave This Town" and "Method of Madness" by the Florida band Shinedown. (To be fair, just two rap disks have made that mark, leaving the real winner here country, with six releases shooting past the million bar).
In the U.K., things look even more rock-averse. According to Music Week, rock songs fell to their lowest level in 50 years in 2010. Just three tracks appeared among their 100 top sellers. Only 3% of the U.K.'s hit songs could be credited to rock, while 47% came from the world of hip hop.
So, does this mean rock fans should stick a fork in their genre and be done with it?
Hardly.
A closer look at SoundScan/Nielsen figures shows that, despite its considerable losses, and rap's gains, rock remains the mightiest genre of all — by far.
Rock enjoyed sales of over 103 million albums last year, making it the peak genre. Add "alternative" album sales to that figure and you have 156 million. Fold in heavy metal (most would), and you've leaped beyond the 188 million mark.
By contrast, rap had less than one-sixth of rock's combined strength, with just over 27 million CDs sold in the last year.
There's even better news for rock, courtesy of a brand-new chart configured by SoundScan. It measures digital song sales by genre. That offers a good measure of music's future, since three-quarters of the transactions tracked by SoundScan now come from the digital world.
Here, too, rock proved the most potent sound. It claimed 27% of overall sales, followed by pop, with 25.4%. Rap was down at No. 4, with just 13% of the pie.
So how can rock suffer so many setbacks and still have such command?
According to David Bakula, senior vice president of Nielsen Entertainment, the defining issue is back-catalogue sales.
"There isn't any genre that translates better to catalogue sales than rock," he says. "Last year, 55% of our overall track sales came from catalogue."
In other words, rock doesn't need to generate as many huge new big-selling bands as long as acts like Queen, Journey, Guns 'N Roses, Bon Jovi, AC/DC and Pink Floyd keep moving classics.
In addition, Bakula credits the Beatles' debut appearance on digital with helping drive the surge in rock sales. While no rock act made the list of Top Ten album-movers in the past year, the Beatles made the broader "Top Selling Artists," which takes into account sales of songs as well as CDs.
More, when you look at the list of the Top Ten Selling Albums in all SoundScan history — which now measures nearly 20 years — half the albums come from rock's realm.
By contrast, no rap act made that list. Also, rap has the lowest catalogue sales of all 27 genres broken out by Nielsen.
"Who's going back to rediscover DMX right now, as opposed to who's just discovering the Beatles?" Bakula asks.
The split in genres invites a nagging question: Who defines what's a rock record, as opposed to pop or "alternative"? Some might call, say, Train a rock band, though most would consider them pop. Likewise, should you call the Decemberists "alternative" or just rock?
According to Bakula, the distributors and labels make the call on their own product, the better to make sure each is recognized in its proper category by radio formats and retail outlets (digital and physical).
"We do have a little bit of a review process," he qualifies. "There's oversight to make sure someone doesn't call a song 'gospel' just to get at No. 1 on that chart when it's actually a track by Motley Crue."
Bakula feels his company's new Digital Song Genre breakdown may help rock further in the future. "It has an effect on who they'll sign, how much money they spend on them and the length of time a piece of music is marketed," he says.
Of course, a lot of the outcome depends on the individual artists. Country has done well of late mainly because of Taylor Swift, Lady Antebellum and the Zak Brown Band. Rap has soared on the fortunes of Eminem and Drake. But if those names fade, and they're not replaced by sufficiently enticing new stars, rap and country will recede.
Right now, rock lacks a huge new name — like Linkin Park and Nickelback in the last decade, or grunge bands in the '90s. While Kings of Leon looked to fill that role with their previous smash CD, the group failed to live up to it on their latest.
If rock finds a new version of U2, that and its undying catalogue sales could let this proud genre define the times once again — not just covertly, but loud enough for anyone to hear.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertai...digital_sales_due_to_backcatalogue_popul.html
What do you guys think???
White people just has more money!
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