Today’s thread is brought to you by the numbers 2.7K, 164K, 10M, 35M and 100M
David Bowie’s death shocked the world and led to an outpouring of affection across the digital world. Within 12 hours of the announcement, he had been the subject of 100M Facebook interactions between 35M people. He locked up first and second spots on the BB Twitter Trending 140. Streaming of his songs on Spotify surged 2700%. On the digital download charts, his album “Backstar” shot to the top of the iTunes album rolling chart. “Best of Bowie” sits at number 2 and two more of his albums are in the top 10. For Internet albums, “Backstar” is at number 2 and “Best of Bowie” at number 4. “Blackstar” will be the number one album in the UK this week. Over on the single’s chart, his “Space Oddity” is at 3, “Changes” at 7, “Let’s Dance” at 9 and “Under Pressure” at 10. His songs are sprinkled throughout the top 100 (currently sitting at 21 songs).
We finally have some changes on the Hot 100 this week. Good news and bad news for the Biebs. First, he has his second number one single (following “What Do You Mean”). “Sorry” sat for 8 long weeks at number 2 before sliding into the number one spot (which ties a record for the longest at number 2 before rising to number 1 – OutKast’s “The Way You Move” in 2003/2004). “Sorry” tops the Streaming and On-Demand charts as well. Bieber also takes control of the Digital Download chart with his non-single single. “Love Yourself” is set to be the next single, but it’s not waiting. The song moved 164K this week and retains the number 3 spot on the Hot 100. The bad news for him is that he no longer has 3 songs in the top 5 and must settle for 3 songs in the top 10. “What Do You Mean” falls to 8th.
Adele’s “Hello” held the number one spot for 10 weeks, but no more. She has slid to number 2, but 10 weeks is a substantial run at the top of that chart. The song continues to top the Radio airplay chart. Drake’s “Hotline Bling” is content to stay at 4th for another week and twenty-one pilots sees their “Stressed Out” gets to top 5 (the first time an American artist/group has been in the top 5 for 10 long weeks). Selena Gomez’s “Same Love” moves up a sport to 6th (and takes over the Pop airplay chart) trading spots with Shawn Mendes’s “Stitches”. At 9th is Alessia Cara’s “Here” and Meghan Trainor’s “Like I’m Going to Lose You” sticking at 10th. There are 6 Canadian songs in the top 10 this week.
Here is an interesting article on Digital Deflation. The music industry is growing, but shrinking at the same time. Track equivalent album consumption was up 15.2% last year, but revenue was down. Digital deflation was originally coined for advertising and explains how revenue is lost as people switch from physical to digital media. In the music industry, we’ve already seen that with the ability to buy tracks. Before, you pretty much had to buy the entire album to get the songs you wanted (there were some CD singles but they were prohibitively expensive and annoying – plus they weren’t released for all songs). So, people could get the 3 songs they wanted from an album for $3 (back when the cost 99 cents) instead of an album full of 9 songs they didn’t want for $15. More people bought those 3 songs, but revenue still went down. Now, they introduce streaming. Radio, print media and broadcast television are also seeing drops in ad revenue. Interestingly, while the consumption of music used to be split pretty evenly between current and catalog music, it now sits at 30/70 (catalog music is seeing massive gains). What does that mean for breaking new artists?
In other news…Apple Music hits a milestone with 10M paid subscribers.
