12 Music Week 12.07.13 BUSINESSANALYSIS Q2 RECORD SALES
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Columbia co-managing director Mark Terry
reckons the way the French duo primed their album was “almost a masterclass in marketing”. “They do very little, but what they do they do
brilliantly and they’ve done it with style and real thought. They’ve delivered an incredible album, an incredible piece of music with Get Lucky and it’s really just caught the imagination,” he says. “It’s almost recreating the way we approach
ABOVE
Lifting retail: Rudimental’s Home was Q2’s fourth biggest artist album
LEFT Long way up: Tom Odell was No 1 at end of Q2
campaigns, but actually a lot of it is harking back to the way we would have approached campaigns in the Seventies and the Eighties, those big statements: highly creative but big statements that leave a real impression in your mind.” Virgin Records president Ted Cockle, whose
company had albums by Emeli Sande and Bastille in the quarter-end Top 10, reckons every week currently “something with some volume is coming
into the market”. “I’m personally delighted about the Rudimental
album, which is a totally modern record and Disclosure have made a wonderful album. Daft Punk satisfies loads of middle youth and I thought the Rod Stewart record was excellent, so I’m not overly surprised that continues to stay there,” he says. Entertainment Retailers Association chairman Paul Quirk is generally disappointed with the
SINGLES: Q2 FINISHES FLAT DESPITE COLUMBIA’S GROUND-BREAKING GET LUCKY SUCCESS
Daft Punk’s Get Lucky sold more copies in a quarter than any other non-reality or charity single this century, but still could not prevent Q2 sales finishing flat. The Columbia release featuring Pharrell Williams shifted
1,023,954 copies by the end of June, a quarter total beaten only this side of the millennium by first singles from reality stars Will Young and Gareth Gates and Band Aid 20’s fundraising Do They Know It’s Christmas.
In fact, the last single not in aid of a charity or emerging
out of a TV show to sell more copies during a quarter was Britney Spears’ Jive-issued Baby One More Time, which shifted 1.2 million copies in Q1 1999. Despite Get Lucky’s excellent run, which included it
selling 100,000 copies for five consecutive weeks, the overall singles market hardly budged in the quarter, rising just 0.1% year-on-year to around 47.0m units, according to the Official Charts Company. The almost flat market is all the more surprising because the Daft Punk track was hardly the only blockbuster of the quarter with four other releases having shifted 500,000 copies over the three months. The biggest of these, Interscope/Polydor act Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, also featured Pharrell Williams (alongside TI), meaning the Neptunes co-founder was present on two tracks which collectively shifted more than 1.8 million copies by the end of June. Nettwerk’s Passenger single Let Her Go (604,700), the Virgin release La La La by Naughty Boy (pictured, opposite page) featuring Sam Smith (571,635) and Asylum/Atlantic- signed Rudimental’s Waiting All Night featuring Ella Eyre (533,871) also all sold more than 500,000 units compared to just two tracks reaching that landmark in the second quarter of last year. Universal commercial division managing director Brian
Rose argues the smaller annual rise is the sign of a maturing singles market. “We’ve had consecutive growth for something like the
last seven years and it’s probably more than that,” he says. “As you continue consecutive growth you’re having a slowing down, but the reassuring piece of this is when you have a huge hit you can drive really significant volume through in a
short period of time. There were strong signs in the second quarter and certainly in the last maybe six weeks after a sluggish start to the year.” His Universal colleague, Virgin Records president Ted Cockle, also notes that Q2 this year had to compete with an equivalent period in 2012, which had its own runaway successes such as Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Maybe and Fun’s We Are Young. “That was a golden period, so we’re having another golden period,” he says. “We’ve had another load of singles that have done ridiculously well as last year and some of them are coming from nowhere and from unexpected places.” Their popularity and those of tracks by acts including
Ministry of Sound’s Duke Dumont and RCA’s Pink meant Q2’s Top 10 sellers collectively sold 26.2% more units than the equivalent 10 tracks did during Q2 2012. Sales of the period’s 40 leading tracks were also significantly up on the year (7.9%), while the quarter’s Top 100 cuts shifted 2.8% more copies combined than the corresponding tracks did 12 months earlier, revealing that it is not at the top end of the market where growth has stalled. Ministry of Sound managing director David Dollimore, whose company scored big Q2 hits with Duke Dumont and
TOP 10 SINGLES Q2 2013 POS
ARTIST/ TITLE / LABEL
Chris Malinchak, says: “The top five and even the Top 10 singles sales are very high and we saw that with things like the Robin Thicke single and the Daft Punk record and that’s keeping singles sales high, but below the Top 20 they’re slightly lower.” The flat market across the quarter compared to a respectable annual rise of 3.9% in the previous three months, which would suggest drawing any firm conclusions about what is happening to one-track download sales would be premature. It could well be the continuing expansion of streaming services such as Spotify and Deezer is now stealing some business from the download market as consumers make the most of the vast catalogue of tracks available at their fingertips, but when it comes to the very biggest hits they still want to own them. That, though, at this stage is just theorising and it will take at least several more quarters to see if a pattern emerges. Those supporting the idea streaming is cannibalising
download sales could point to what is happening in the US where in the first six months of 2013 one-track sales fell by 2.3% to 682.2 million units, according to Nielsen SoundScan. If the trend continues until the end of the year it will be the market’s first annual drop since iTunes launched there.
Columbia co-managing director Mark Terry, whose Source: Official Charts Company
1 DAFT PUNK FEAT. PHARRELL WILLIAMS Get Lucky Columbia 2 ROBIN THICKE FEAT. TI & PHARRELL WILLIAMS Interscope 3 PASSENGER Let Her Go Nettwerk 4 NAUGHTY BOY FEAT. SAM SMITH Virgin 5 RUDIMENTAL FEAT. ELLA EYREWaiting All Night Asylum 6 MACKLEMORE & RYAN LEWIS FEAT. RAY DALTON Can’t Hold Us Macklemore 7 DUKE DUMONT FEAT. A*M*E Need U (100 Percent) Ministry of Sound 8 PINK FEAT. NATE RUESS Just Give Me A Reason RCA 9 CALVIN HARRIS FEAT. ELLIE GOULDING I Need Your Love Columbia 10 OLLY MURS Dear Darlin’ Epic
company released Daft Punk’s million seller, says it is “a little bit early” to try to draw any conclusions about streaming’s impact on download sales. “The streaming services are obviously being bolstered
year-on-year,” he adds. “They are getting stronger and more and more people are using streaming services as another alternative to buying music, certainly in the first instance, and maybe it takes them a little bit longer to be convinced to buy a piece of music, but I’m not sure whether necessarily it’s cannibalising the singles chart at the moment.” A healthy six of the period’s Top 10 singles came from UK acts, but homegrown share of the quarter-end Top 100 dropped from 44.5% in Q2 2012 to 40% a year later as US talent took charge. The likes of Robin Thicke and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis gave acts from the States an unrivalled 42% of the 100 biggest sellers.
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