Music listeners everywhere might be interested in this little tidbit – not a single album went platinum this year.
What does that mean exactly?
Well, famous musicians like Chevelle, The Black Keys, or even Linkin Park have not sold one million copies of their albums that were released this year. Does that mean musicians in the music industry have to worry about making sales now?
Not quite.
The idea of purchasing an album is a dying practice. Most people just end up purchasing singles off iTunes or Amazon for just over a dollar each, instead of the entire album which has always a crapshoot as far as appeal. I for one can not remember the last time I bought an entire album, but it has been over five years.
That’s not the only contributing factor, though. These days, we have the luxury of streaming services like Pandora and Spotify compared to ten years ago. Having a subscription to the latter enables users to stream whole albums with no additional price, thus hindering the need to purchase an entire album.
Are music execs worried? Not entirely. The decline has been an ongoing trend, which was to be expected since the inception of digital music. Record labels were worried when sales fell under 10 million in 2002. But music companies seemed to have adapted to the digital age very well.
While owning a physical music album may be the lacking trend, don’t expect it to go away entirely. There will still be those appreciative vintage users that want physical copies of their favorite bands and artists.
Moving onwards though, the idea of making the digital album the new medium has potential of expanding beyond the limits compact discs possess, which is a maximum of 80 minutes tops. Musicians now have the ability to sell albums over the limited amount of time without worrying about going over.
Whether artists are ambitious enough to create such a device though, remains to be the question. And quantity doesn’t always mean quality.
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