Needles and plastic
COVER STORY
From E17 biggest songs sold in astronomical quantities while everything else sold bugger all. Last year, more than eight million different songs were downloaded around the globe, but 94 per cent were downloaded fewer than 100 times. Amazingly, 30 per cent of all digital music released last year was downloaded only once or twice, presumably by the singer’s supportive mum.
Many musicians made more money licensing songs to ads, TV shows and movies than selling them to listeners this year, treating digital distribution more as an audience-building promotional outlet than a serious earner, in the hope that they might later extract money from that audience by touring.
With this in mind, some commentators have suggested a musician’s smartphone is now as important a tool in their musical career as their guitar, allowing fresh photos, videos and other content to be constantly fed to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube and then out to fans craving a feeling – however illusory – of personal connection. Ideally, these fans would then become a de facto sales team, promoting the musician’s gigs, sharing their playlists, and keeping their public profile strong.
But some chose to turn their backs on digital music altogether. No longer the preserve of beardy jazz fans, hip-hop DJs and hi-fi fetishists, vinyl LPs continued to grow in popularity this year, with many buyers eschewing tinny CDs or over-compressed digital files in favour of an aesthetically pleasing physical artifact they could hold in their hands. Demand for vinyl has increased steadily since 2006, and this year people around the globe bought more vinyl records than at any time in the preceding two decades.
And what was the musical mainstream listening to? Adele, as it happens. Still. The album that wouldn’t die just kept on selling, as did underwhelming pop albums from Justin Bieber, Madonna, One Direction, Mumford and Sons, Bruno Mars, David Guetta, Gotye and the late Whitney Houston. Taylor Swift continued to dominate the popcountry charts, and there was also an unexpected hit country album by former ceiling-dancer, Lionel Richie.
Meanwhile, mainstream hiphop and R’n’B, key drivers of pop culture worldwide, fractured into myriad micro-styles, with electro,