14 MusicWeek 06.07.12
BUSINESSANALYSIS ’FAKE’ COVERVERSIONS EDITORIAL
Frustrated consumers judging tracks by their covers
THE UK IS RENOWNED for regularly being out of step politically with the rest of Europe, but it also appears to be a law unto itself when it comes to music retail. While the continent – and sometimes Ireland for that matter –
will typically make the hottest new one-track downloads available to buy immediately, the industry here continues to behave like it’s the 1990s by holding back releases in the hope the extra promotion will drive a higher first-week chart position. Attempts to remedy this situation last year with on air/on
sale ultimately failed, not least because two of the majors – Universal and Sony – quickly lost their nerve having initially made such a public show of supporting the initiative. That is all ancient history now, but what got largely
overlooked at the time was just how unique to the UK music industry the whole issue is. Countries on the continent simply do not allow gaps of sometimes up to a couple of months between a record debuting on the radio and consumers being able to buy it. As a result, music fans in the rest of Europe were able to purchase the likes of Maroon 5’s Payphone, Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe and Flo Rida’s Whistle many weeks before those in the UK could follow suit.
“Of far greater concern, though much harder to measure, are the potential sales lost to piracy by those who want to purchase the real thing but are not willing to wait...”
However, it is not only the remainder of Europe the UK is so
at odds with. In the US brand new tracks will also generally go to radio and retail around the same time and this approach has hardly harmed the expansion of the one-track download market there. Year-to-date US singles sales reached a record 672.73 million units up to last week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, 5.9% higher than at the same stage in 2011. Equally frustrating has been several acts recently occupying
some of the precious few primetime slots available for music on UK TV simply to perform tracks the viewer cannot then immediately buy. Cheryl, Maroon 5 and The Wanted all fall into this category
and, while their labels will probably argue the singles they performed ultimately achieved high chart debuts and big first- week numbers, who can say these sales would not have happened anyway, just over a longer period of time and without the consumer frustration? Increasingly benefiting from this situation is the rising
number of labels flooding the market with copy versions of held-back tracks. The high sales of some of these cash-in covers is evidence itself of what can result when you deny the public what it wants. But of far greater concern, though much harder to measure,
are the potential sales lost to piracy by those who want to purchase the real thing but are not willing to wait. Their impatience does not justify piracy, but their behaviour is surely encouraged by labels who continue to disadvantage UK music fans compared to their continental cousins. Paul Williams, Head of Business Analysis
Do you have views on this column? Feel free to comment by emailing
paul.williams@intentmedia.co.uk
RELEASES BY PAUL WILLIAMS
M
aroon 5’s chart-topping Payphone has thrown the spotlight on the lengthy hold- back of key new releases in the UK
compared to the rest of Europe. The Interscope/Polydor track, which features
Wiz Khalifa, achieved one of the highest first-week sales of the year to date when it sold 141,410 copies to debut at No.1 at the end of last month on the Official UK singles chart. However, that chart arrival followed not just a
number of weeks after UK radio started playing the track but also after a similar time period when music fans in the rest of Europe could first legally download it. The gap between Payphone’s release date in the
UK – June 17 – and the remainder of Europe, around mid-April, was unexceptionally lengthy, but the delay was far from unique with many other big international hits this year having been deliberately held back for UK release compared to elsewhere. Other tracks handled in this way include Interscope/ Polydor act Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe, Virgin signing Katy Perry’s Part Of Me and the Atlantic release Whistle by Flo Rida. For Maroon 5 this is the band’s
second brand new single in a row that has been treated in this way with their 2011 hit Moves Like Jagger featuring Christina Aguilera having been released in Europe around June 22 last year but was then not rolled out in the UK until August 14, more than a month after it had started winning significant British radio support. At the time the big gap between
radio promotion for a track before unleashing it onto the public in the hope of securing a big first- week sale and high chart debut. In the cases of both Moves Like Jagger and
The decision to hold back such in-demand tracks
for so long in the UK has resulted in many
thousands of music fans instead turning to
soundalike versions flooding the market
Moves Like Jagger’s UK radio and retail debuts highlighted what had been an increasing abandonment of the policy of on air/on sale, which was about ensuring music consumers could legally acquire new releases as soon as they first heard them on the radio. The strategy has now virtually disappeared with UK labels going back to the tried- and-tested method of seeking weeks of upfront
Payphone that certainly happened, but Payphone’s entry at one in the UK occurred more than a month after it had first registered on the sales charts in a number of key European territories, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain. During this time it had sold around 160,000 downloads across the rest of Europe, according to Nielsen Music statistics. By the time of its commercial
release in the UK, Payphone had spent a further two weeks inside the Top 10 of Nielsen’s weekly UK radio airplay chart, peaking at five pre-release, and six weeks in total in the radio Top 100. Maroon 5 had also performed the
track on the final of BBC One’s The Voice, watched by an average of 7.1 million people, according to Barb, and broadcast on June 2, more than a fortnight before the track went up on iTunes UK and other British digital music stores. Supporters of this hold-back strategy can point
to Payphone’s opening UK sales being the third highest of the year to date, behind only fellow
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