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Music biz suffers post-turkey blues
12/07/2007 8:00 PM, Reuters
Geoff Mayfield
Although 2000 marked the fattest
year of album sales since Nielsen SoundScan set up shop in
1991, the final year of the millennium also begat a troubling
trend.
Prior to that year, volume would spike during Thanksgiving
week and then build each week through Christmas. Even in years
when the week after Thanksgiving was void of top 10 starts by
new releases on The Billboard 200 -- as was the case in each
year from 1995 to 1997 and again in 1999 -- volume for the
post-turkey frame managed to eclipse the album sales clocked
during the November holiday's frenzy.
But, in every year from 2000 on, the week after
Thanksgiving represents a speed bump on the way to the
Christmas week's peak.
Even in 2003, when the week after Thanksgiving brought a
then-career-high frame of 618,000 for Alicia Keys as "The Diary
of Alicia Keys" bowed at No. 1, or a year later when 368,000
made a No. 1 start for Jay-Z and Linkin Park's "Collision
Course," volume lagged behind the holiday week's pace.
One cause for the shift has to be the increased focus on
Black Friday sales, which finds discount-driven music sellers
like Wal-Mart and Circuit City slashing some high-profile
releases to as little as $5. With those kinds of sales spiking
Thanksgiving-week traffic, a step down in volume becomes
inevitable, especially this year, when the top debut came in at
a lowly No. 50, rapper Pitbull's "The Boatlift."
Overall sales were down 12.1% from the previous week (12.26
million copies vs. 13.94 million), and down 16.9% from the same
week last year (14.75 million). Year-to-date sales are down
14.5 percent from 2006.
Reuters/Billboard
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