Adele’s ’21′ sold more than 5.8 million last year, with 1.8 million being full digital album sales. These are sales numbers that arrest a six year downward trend in album sales, since the year Usher sold a few million more of his ‘Confessions’ album.

The record industry is dead; long live the digital record industry!

In the snarky parlance of these Twitter-ing times: #NotSoMuch.

 

 

Exceptional Exceptions

In no way am I demeaning the achievements of my homeland heroine. On the contrary, the widespread mainstream acceptance of a bona fide musical talent, at a time when Simon Cowell’s mediocrity manufacturing line dominates the pop landscape, affords me renewed hope for the future of popular music.

But it is the very fact that she’s exceptional that makes Adele the exception, rather than the new rule for the recorded music industry.

Consider the wider environment of the year in which ’21′ broke:

• CD sales continued to decline, down another 6% by Sound Scan’s 2011 numbers.

• Digital sales were up and passed 100 million album downloads, yet the lower price point of these sales – sometimes as low as $1 or $2 – still sees downloads struggling to compensate for falling sales of physical product.

• Streaming music sites, based on a subscription, ‘all you can eat’ model, began to spring into mainstream consciousness around the middle of the year. Albums popped on and off of sites such as Spotify, as artists like Coldplay and, indeed, Adele, decided whether or not such services cannibalize album sales.

• Another massive sales story, Lady GaGa’s ‘Born This Way’ release, sold millions in a first week promotion at the deep discount price of just 99 cents on Amazon.com. This further diluted the validity of digital music sales as a barometer for the course of the record industry, with Billboard revising their chart conditions as a direct result.

 

Beyond this, there lie also the questions of cloud storage, digital lending, matching services such as Apple’s proposition (which can be seen as legitimizing past illegal downloads in user music collections), and myriad other digital services that will straddle the increasingly gray area between legal listening and infringing copyright.

In summary, 2011 saw massive upheaval in the ways we can listen to music, with many potential business models emerging but none clearly taking the lead. Against that backdrop, a few wildly successful individual albums can be seen as more of a life jacket for record sales, rather than the rescue helicopter that some make it out to be.

 

The Future

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: [(O)] Photography

 

So, where are we heading?

The only concrete positive to be taken from Adele’s example, in relation to recorded music sales, is that mainstream listeners will still flock in their millions when they hear true talent and passion in pop music. When an artist truly connects on a deeply human level.

What we can’t say is that digital download sales will save the day. Or that listeners are flocking back to music purchases after a decade of litigation from the major players in the industry.

What did offer hope in 2011 is that innovation and new modes of delivering music finally started to gain some traction. From streaming subscriptions to storage in the cloud, no one can say for certain that any of the providers will win out as the successor to physical recording sales.

But after over ten years of taking one step forward, two steps back, it’s encouraging to finally start accessing legal music through channels that befit the 21st century. Let’s hope it brings still more success for the likes of Adele, not to mention the thousands of artists eagerly playing away to follow in her footsteps.

 

And you?

How do you feel about the state of the record industry? Do you see a new business model emerging any time soon?

I’d also love to hear who still buys physical records, who downloads, streams etc. How do you prefer to get your music?