Mayer depicts face of change in music biz
With a wild new album release, John Mayer exemplifies how the music industry has evolved.
With a wild new release, John Mayer exemplifies how the music industry has evolved |
When John Mayer released his debut album “Room for Squares” in September 2001 the record industry hadn’t yet collapsed.
He was 23 and a talented young guitarist, so somebody at Columbia — a prestige record label back when that mattered — believed in him. They were rewarded for their investment: “Squares” was a slow-grower, and by March of the following year it was yielding hits and selling a lot of copies — actual, physical CDs in a time when boy bands were still dominating sales charts.
The debut sales success of Mayer, who plays the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion Sunday, turned out to be one of the last in a now antiquated system that was built on the premise that a music gatekeeper with money makes an investment in young talent. Risk and reward and all that. Mayer, with five platinum records on his résumé, was a reward.
Still, even at the outset, the success of Mayer’s first album was built in part through a more modern approach that was ahead of its time. Before Columbia released “Squares,” the album existed as an internetonly release issued by a little Atlanta label called Aware.
Three months ago, Mayer released “The Search for Everything,” his seventh album. Again, his music arrived through an unorthodox rollout. He offered four songs as “The Search for Everything: Wave One” in January, followed by “The Search for Everything: Wave Two” in February. Each had four songs. The final four were included in the complete album.
Musicians have shown a reluctance to abandon the album as a format. That format has, for more than half a century, been the defining canvas for most musicians who see individual songs as snapshots in a larger work representing them in a specific time and place. But the album has weathered a rough 15 years, marked by online piracy, declining sales and the paradigm shift to digital products and streaming. Case in point, John Mayer. His “Squares” sold more than a million copies in its first nine months, which was a strong debut. Granted, the definition of a “sale” is different today in the age of streaming, but “The Search for Everything” sold more than 125,000 album equivalent units in its first week. These days that’s considered a big success.
If “album equivalent units” fails to roll off the tongue, consider the 2016 yearend report by BuzzAngle, a company that measures music consumption across all platforms. The king of 2016 by their measure was Drake, whose “Views” reached nearly
4 million “total project consumption units.”
For comparison, in 2001, Linkin Park’s “Hybrid Theory” sold 4.8 million albums, with almost all of them coming in the physical format. But, for some context, that was a down year. The top selling album in 2000, “No Strings Attached” by NSYNC, sold 9.9 million copies. In 2002, Eminem’s “The Eminem Show” moved 7.6 million records.
Yes, times are a-changing. And the BuzzAngle report had plenty of interesting data about this shift.
• Not surprisingly, physical album sales continue to plummet, down nearly 12 percent from the year before. That said there were still 89 million physical copies sold, which makes me feel less alone in the world.
• Overall album sales were down 15 percent, which must be distressing for artists who prefer to create their songs in bundles.
• Song downloads were down, too, as streaming continues to grow to the tune of more than 80 percent over the previous year.
Regardless, artists are reacting not by abandoning the album format but rather doubling down on their efforts to present an album as an interesting evolution.
One of the industry’s biggest scams was charging listeners $18 for a pop CD in the ’90s and early 2000s. Artists with heavy radio play, like Britney Spears, saw their one or two viable singles packaged with garbage tracks and sold for the same $18. When the six desirable minutes of music became available for $2 through iTunes — or for free through other means — the album format went into free fall.
But an interesting development has seen former singles artists — like Beyoncé, to name just one — find value in the album. Her last two collections of music were released as albums, not teased by singles or behind marketing campaigns built around one or two key tracks. They were issued as whole pieces of expression. And Beyoncé wasn’t content to just make “Lemonade” a strong album of songs. She also produced a visual counterpart for it
Fifteen years ago, Carly Rae Jepsen fans would’ve been gouged by her label: forced to pay full album price for a single or two, like her megahit “Call Me Maybe,” which sold 6 million “units” in 2012, the year it was released. Her 2015 album, “Emotion,” proved dense with interesting music. SPIN called her latest single, “Cut to the Feeling,” “black tar pop music.” “Feeling” hints at intriguing and dark things to come from her next album, but right now it’s unconnected to any Jepsen release. It appears she knows the value of a good single as well as a loaded album.
Despite all the data in the BuzzAngle report, nobody has cut a single clear path through the woods going forward. The old system ran nearly a half century and spanned multiple formats —LP, cassette, CD — which is pretty impressive for an industry built around the concept of perpetual renewal. But digitization proved the industry’s undoing: turning music into ones and zeros was enormously profitable until those ones and zeros started getting traded without any exchange of money.
But musicians are increasingly taking control of this mess. Some have used the digital sphere for projects that would have proved logistically difficult in years past.
• Max Richter’s “Sleep” was one of my favorite albums from 2016. The German ambient composer designed “Sleep” as an eight-hour experience to accompany a night’s sleep. He also made a “Sleep” that fits onto an LP/CD, but what fun is that?
• Brian Eno this year released “Reflection,” a 54-minute ambient piece as a CD and LP. For those with more time on their hands, Eno also offered “Reflection” as a generative music app that will play as long as a listener wants it to. “My original intention with ambient music was to make endless music,” Eno wrote. “Music that would be there as long as you wanted it to be. I wanted also that this music would unfold differently all the time — like sitting by a river: it’s always the same river, but it’s always changing . ... an endless and endlessly changing version of the piece of music.”
• Countering Eno’s modern approach are David Rawlings and Gillian Welch, who have made eight albums together. Their attentiveness to capturing an unadorned, rootsy style of music makes the pair seem like a natural fit for vinyl, though until last week none of their albums were pressed into that form. A Wall Street Journal story last week tells of how they sunk $100,000 into their own recordcutting lathe. Welch and Rawlings court a smaller audience than Beyoncé, but theirs is a fervent following, many of whom are attuned to the nuances Welch and Rawlings believe a wellproduced LP will provide.
The artists are assuming higher risk with shakier opportunity for reward. But at this point, what choice do they have?
Whether it’s a visual album, an endless album, an expensive vinyl album or an album deconstructed into three installments and released over the course of a season, musicians are seeking different ways to convince people to pay for something they want, even if they don’t necessarily want to pay for it.