16 MusicWeek 17.01.14
BUSINESSANALYSIS US MARKET IN 2013 EDITORIAL
UK mustn’t lose sight of realistic US achievements
Fifty years ago this month The Beatles’ I Want To Hold
Your Hand climbed to No 1 on the Hot 100, changing the face of music forever and the prospects of UK acts trying to break America. Before then the States was largely a no-go area for British
acts with the occasional hit heavily outweighed by UK pop royalty like Cliff Richard failing to make any real impact there. The Fab Four’s breakthrough, though, made everything
possible. Suddenly the door opened and countless other Brits were able to follow The Beatles’ example and become superstars in the home of rock ‘n’ roll. Five decades on, making it in the US remains the ultimate
test of whether an act has truly achieved global stardom. In 2012 plenty of British ones did, supplying four of the year’s five biggest sellers Stateside, but the pedal eased off the gas over the following 12 months.
“Although British music could certainly improve its present position in the US, we need to keep in check what can reasonably be achieved”
That isn’t to say there were no Brit successes in the States in
2013. Mumford & Sons won Grammy Album of the Year, One Direction scored a third Billboard No 1 and new acts such as Bastille made their first encouraging steps. All great then, but we should also bear in mind that what occurred over the two years before was exceptional, driven by the mega sales of Adele’s 21, which not only transformed UK fortunes in the US but those of the entire record business. So it is important we should handle carefully the CBI’s newly-
published The Creative Nation report in which it suggests the UK music industry has the potential to double its share of US album sales by 2025. That share hit a 21st Century high of 13.6% in 2012, but
even using a modest annual share of 10% as a starting point means the CBI’s ambitions indicate within the space of little more than a decade we would have to grow our stake in the market to around 20%. Although British music could certainly improve its present
position, we need to keep in check what can be reasonably achieved. After all, the US is one of the most indigenous music markets on the planet and large parts of it are almost exclusively homegrown. Country and rap, for example, two genres almost entirely
about North American artists, accounted for around 20% of all US album sales in 2013. Add in the likes of Latin and that leaves about 75% of the market left realistically open to the UK to penetrate. Based on the CBI’s aims, British acts by 2025 would need to control more than a quarter of that. The early signs for 2014 are encouraging with the likes of
Arctic Monkeys, Bastille, Passenger and John Newman all climbing the main Billboard charts, raising the prospect this could be a great year for British music in the US. Yet while it is always good to “think big”, as the CBI report suggests, it is equally important not to get too carried away.
Paul Williams, Head of Business Analysis Do you have views on this column? Feel free to comment by emailing
paul.williams@intentmedia.co.uk % CHANGE 5.7% 8.4% 14.5% 0.1% +33%
Streaming up in key territory, but digital sales are down EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
SALES n BY PAUL WILLIAMS
T
he US sent out a clear message to the UK record industry about what it might face in the near future as streaming hit record new
highs in 2013, but download sales started to fall. As the world’s most mature post-physical music
market, what happens in the States is usually a template of what the UK and other leading music territories can expect to happen to them eventually so Nielsen SoundScan and Billboard’s 2013 report makes particularly interesting reading. It is no surprise to see streaming forging ahead
with 118.1 billion tracks streamed in the States last year across platforms including YouTube/Vevo, Spotify, Rdio and Rhapsody. That’s a 32% year-on-year rise with the leading track, Baauer’s (pictured, above) Harlem Shake, attracting nearly 490 million plays. This was nearly 210 million streams ahead of
the year’s second-biggest track, PSY’s Gangnam Style, with Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (pictured, right) featuring Wanz’s Thrift Shop around 23
US SALES STATISTICS 2013 Source: Nielsen SoundScan
SALES PERIOD 2013 2012
SINGLES
1.26bn 1.34bn
TOTAL ALBUMS 289.4m 316.0m
CD ALBUMS 165.4m 193.3m
DIGITAL ALBUMS 117.6m 117.7m
VINYL ALBUMS 6.1m 4.6m
n US album sales down 8.4% in 2013 to 289.4m units n Digital album and one-track markets dropped annually for first time with latter falling 5.7% n Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience top album with 2.4 million units sold n Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines leading single with 6.5 million copies sold n Vinyl sales up 33% year-on-year to 6.1 million units
million plays further behind. However, the gains made by streaming were
accompanied by the first year-on-year falls in the market for both digital album and one-track sales. In the UK digital album sales continued to grow in 2013, up 6.8% annually despite dropping by around 3% over the last three months of the year, but in the US they started going in reverse. This was only by 0.1% with 117.6 million albums bought this way during the year, but compared to a 14.1% rise in 2012. One notable trend in the drop was that the fall
was happening only on catalogue. There were 3.8% fewer back catalogue digital albums bought
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