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06.07.12 MusicWeek 15
TRACKS
LEFT/BELOW Sing it again: Maroon 5’s Payphone is the year’s most- covered track – while Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe boasts a similar ‘distinction’
Polydor single Call My Name by Cheryl (152,001) and the Decca-issued Sing by Gary Barlow and the Commonwealth Band (142,470). However, it is impossible to know whether
delaying the release for such a long time, so extending its pre-release promotional window, resulted in generating extra sales because awareness was higher or the track simply achieved the same number of sales that would have occurred anyway had it come out earlier, only in a shorter time period. What is unarguable, however, is 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 sound-a-like versions flooding the market. It is highly likely some of these purchases were made mistakenly with buyers thinking they were getting the original version
With numerous in-demand songs held back from UK release for weeks after debuting on radio, a rush of soundalike versions are flooding a market that is unwilling to wait
RETAIL RELEASE GAP UK/MAINLAND EUROPE RELEASE GAP ARTIST / TITLE / LABEL
7 WEEKS MAROON 5 FEAT. WIZ KHALIFA Payphone Interscope 6 WEEKS CARLY RAE JEPSEN Call Me Maybe Interscope 6 WEEKS CHRIS BROWN Turn Up The Music RCA 6 WEEKS FLO RIDA Whistle Atlantic 6 WEEKS JENNIFER LOPEZ FEAT. PITBULL Dance Again Epic 5 WEEKS KATY PERRY Part Of Me Virgin 3 WEEKS THE WANTED Chasing The Sun Global Talent 2 WEEKS JUSTIN BIEBER Boyfriend Daf Jam
The above shows the period between when each track was commercially released in mainland Europe and in the UK. The list above does not include Fun featuring Janelle Monae’s We Are Young (Atlantic/Fueled By Ramen) as this was given a soft UK release of September 26 last year in line with it being released elsewhere, although did not chart in the UK until this April, around a month after mainland Europe Source: Music Week research
rather than a copy. Still, at least these purchasers decided to follow a legitimate route. Undoubtedly others, rather than waiting for the Maroon 5 version to go on sale, simply downloaded it illegally. There was similarly a six-week gap between
the UK and mainland European retail releases for Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe and Atlantic act Flo Rida’s Whistle, five weeks for Katy Perry’s Part Of Me and about four weeks for Atlantic/Fueled By Ramen act Fun featuring Janelle Monae track We Are Young, which had been released on September 20 last year in the US but did not impact in Europe until this spring. The vast majority of the new tracks whose
British retail debuts are delayed emanate from North America and when they are by already established acts tend to go on sale in Europe ex-UK
around the same time they are commercially made available in the US and Canada. However, UK music fans this year have even
had to wait a number of weeks after other parts of the world to buy brand new tracks by some British artists. These include The Wanted whose Chasing The Sun was released in the US
ABOVE Deliberately held back for UK release: Katy Perry’s Part Of Me and Flo Rida’s Whistle have been subject to the ‘delay treatment’
on April 17 and in Europe on April 27, but was not put out by Global Talent/Island in the UK until May 20. By this time it had already spent six weeks in Nielsen’s weekly UK airplay chart, rising to seventh position in its week of release, and had been performed on ITV1’s Britain’s Got Talent nearly two weeks before anyone could buy it. A similar scenario occurred with Columbia act
Calvin Harris whose Let’s Go was issued in a few territories more than a month before it came out in the UK.
OPPORTUNISTIC COVER VERSIONS have been around for decades with even legendary Beatles producer Sir George Martin behind some of them. Back in the mid-Sixties
KER-CHING KER-CHING PAYPHONE COVERS MAKING A MINT FOR THE OPPORTUNISTS BIGGEST COPY VERSIONS 2012
Martin provoked the wrath of Burt Bacharach when he copied his arrangement of Dionne Warwick’s recording of Anyone Who Had A Heart on a cover by Cilla Black, which subsequently topped the UK singles chart and left the Warwick cut out in the cold. However, while once such covers were
typically about trying to beat a hit from overseas being successful in the UK, the current market is one inadvertently created by those labels behind the original recordings. The widely-deployed policy of delaying the
commercial release of big international hits to build up demand is now resulting in some instances of dozens of cash-in, copy versions of the same song turning up on iTunes and other digital services. The most extreme
example has been with Interscope/Polydor act Maroon 5 featuring Wiz Khalifa’s Payphone with Music Week previously reporting more than 80 different versions being made available to buy in the UK prior to the original’s release.
Ahead of Maroon 5’s single going on
sale, covers of Payphone collectively sold more than 65,000 units in the UK, according to Official Charts Company data. This total equates to around 46% of the first-week UK sales of Maroon 5’s version and included 40,000 sales of Precision Tunes’ take released on the PT label and distributed by The Orchard. The cover peaked at number nine on the Official UK singles chart in mid-June with 34,000 units sold, although sales plummeted by 90.4% the following week when consumers could finally get hold of the original. Precision Tunes have also been
responsible for soundalike versions of other
CHART ARTIST / TRACK / LABEL PEAK 9 PRECISION TUNES Payphone PT 38 CAN YOU BLOW MY Whistle ICover 49 DREAM TEAM Payphone TDT 49 CARLY RAE JEPSEN TRIBUTE TEAM Call Me Maybe TT 54 RAINBOW MIX We Are Young Rainbow Mix 72 HIT MASTERS Call Me Maybe Hit Masters 78 WE ARE YOUNG SINGERS We Are Young Mega-Sound Music 81 TEENAGE DREAMERS Part Of Me TGIF 100 BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE Turn Up The Music Life Is Music 103 HITS NOW Call Me Maybe Euro Pop Covers
big 2012 hits before the originals came out in the UK, among them Def Jam/Mercury act Justin Bieber’s Boyfriend and the RCA- handled Dance Again by Jennifer Lopez featuring Pitbull. Dance Again is a good example of the way
some copy versions are billed in an easily misleading way to try to encourage sales from consumers thinking they are buying the original. One such cover of Dance Again was
Source: Music Week research
billed as being by the Jennifer Lopez Tribute Team and put out on the TT label. In a similar vein, TT this year has also offered the likes of the Maroon 5 Tribute Team doing Payphone and the Carly Rae Jepsen Tribute Team doing Call Me Maybe. This last release was responsible for
7,000 of the 25,000 sales of sound-a-like covers of Call Me Maybe ahead of Jepsen’s original finally coming out in the UK. No song this year has encouraged
anywhere near the number of cover versions sales as Payphone has, but there have been other noticeable successes. These include around 9,000 takers for the TGIF label’s version of Part Of Me by Teenage Dreamers ahead of Katy Perry’s original coming out, while there were 8,000 sales of Beautiful People’s Turn Up The Music on the Life Is Music label before Chris Brown’s version could be bought. Meanwhile, Glee Cast’s Epic-issued cover
of We Are Young generated nearly 19,000 sales ahead of the full UK commercial roll-out of Fun featuring Janelle Monae’s own hit recording on Atlantic/Fueled By Ramen.
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