Rock, country and the logic of the new mainstream

The calculation goes something like this.

Catalogue releases — old albums, reissues, greatest-hits packages and the like — are responsible for a big chunk of a label’s revenues.

Unlike new music, catalogue isn’t burdened with the sizable costs of paying Max Martin to write the leadoff single, making a video of said single and recording an album, not to mention marketing each of those costly steps, which means it’s responsible for an even bigger chunk of a label’s profits.

The genres that sell best year after year are country and rock, though hip hop from a specific era is beginning to make its mark (more on that in a minute).

Therefore, in order to build a sustainable business, new music should focus on country and rock, because Blake Shelton and Foo Fighters albums have a good shot at still selling in sizable quantities in, say, five years.

Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus? Maybe not so much.

A good chunk of this argument is laid out in what purports to be a series of Sony Music memos included in the massive WikiLeaks dump that inflicted so much pain and embarrassment on the parent company’s movie studio.

Add in the fact that country and rock are two genres that don’t rely on high-priced writing and production teams for their success — remember that NPR piece “How much does it cost to make a hit song?”, which ran the numbers behind Rihanna’s 2011 single “Man Down” and came up with the astronomical sum of $1,078,000 — and you end up with something that feels less like a plausible scenario and more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A glance at this week’s Billboard’s Catalog Albums Chart would seem to bear this out.

The top 10 is populated by the likes of Travis Tritt, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Journey, Metallica and Roger Waters.

Last week’s chart included Shelton, Dwight Yoakam and Foo Fighters.

It also featured an eight-year-old greatest-hits compilation by the Notorious B.I.G., an entry that likely reflects the rapid ascent in the U.S. of a nascent radio format built around the most commercial elements of ’90s hip hop, from Keith Sweat and Mark Morrison to mellower tracks by Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and other standardbearers of West Coast hip hop.

All of this means we’ll be seeing more sweeping, long-term deals like the one Bruce Springsteen reportedly signed this year, which is said to be heavy on box sets and other compilations, and the all-encompassing agreement executed this week by Universal Music for the entirety of Frank Zappa’s recorded catalogue.

More proof: While streaming continues to take million-dollar-sized bites out of both physical and download sales, catalogue releases are definitely faring better at weathering the attacks.

“According to Nielsen’s full-year numbers for 2014,” Music Business Worldwide reported recently, “catalogue digital album sales fell 3.1 per cent year-on-year to 53.6 (million), while ‘current’ digital album sales suffered a more terminal fate, down 15.1 per cent to 52.9 (million). As for physical album sales in the first half of 2015 . . . catalogue was also much more resilient — and has for the past two years comfortably outstripped current album sales.”

Even our understanding of what qualifies as “old” is changing. It used to be that “catalogue” referred to albums released at least five years ago.

These days, however, you can qualify for Billboard’s Catalog Chart after as little as 18 months.

The past, it seems, is a lot closer than we think. jsakamoto@thestar.ca

The genres that sell best year after year are country and rock, though hip hop from a specific era is beginning to make its mark