krj
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response 53 of 55:
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Dec 13 19:11 UTC 2007 |
This one is an ugly URL, sorry:
http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkxNjcmZm
diZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTcyMjc5OTMmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk3
It's a report on New Jersey-based small CD labels which are
encountering more and more difficulty. The main label profiled in the
story is Shanachie, which handles a great deal of Celtic folk and
reggae. Indie rock label Bar/None is also in distress. In contrast,
metal label Eclipse is doing well; they get more from iTunes sales per
copy than from physical CD sales.
Shanachie says sales are down 20% over the last five years. The loss
of Tower Records and small retailers has been a blow. Borders is no
longer welcoming to small indie labels; they are demanding a $2/copy
"co-op" payment to stock the discs in their store. (I did not know
that Borders had moved to demanding a stocking fee from labels; I
thought that was only a policy at Trans World.)
Shanachie used to be able to work some with Wal-Mart (!!) but Wal-Mart
is now streamlining their CD selection and Shanachie and other
specialty labels are now mostly frozen out.
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The Nielsen Soundscan numbers for CD sales are turning into a rout
at the end of the year. These are gleaned from the week-by-week
sales reports from Billboard and no one story has yet assembled the
threads:
In early November, off the top of my head, year-to-date album sales
were down 14% from 2006.
For Thanksgiving week, including the famous Black Friday shopping
day, the downturn accelerated: sales for that one week were down
18% vs. that week year ago.
For the next week, the downturn accelerated again: sales for the one
week were down 23% vs. year-ago. That's the most recent sales report.
Those numbers are for album sales, defined as [CDs + downloads sold
in an album-bunch]. Including single track downloads probably makes
the number look a small bit better, but this is still awful for the
labels and for retailers. The rarely-reported numbers on physical
CD sales are usually -5% from the commonly cited album sales number,
so that would speculatively put last week's CD sales as -28% compared
to the same week last year.
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