February 18, 20241 yr Would 2011 have been around the peak of digital sales for singles? Yeah, the absolute peak was in 2013. One week I think in the summer/autumn sales just suddenly collapsed by like 10% compared to the previous year (before that they used to always be up a few percent) and they just kept falling after then. To this day I still don't know what event caused it, it was way too significant and sudden to be random. My guess is a load of iPhone users got given a free Apple Music subscription or something like that.
February 20, 20241 yr Love Don’t Cost a Thing only being on the verge of half a million surprised me too. I looked back on the EOY 2001 and it only sold 195,000. 26 singles which didn’t reach #1 sold more than it in that year! So maybe reaching #1 skews my perception of how big it actually was, maybe at other times of year it would have only been a Top 5. I think it was released in the early months of the year when sales were traditionally lower. Yeah, the absolute peak was in 2013. One week I think in the summer/autumn sales just suddenly collapsed by like 10% compared to the previous year (before that they used to always be up a few percent) and they just kept falling after then. To this day I still don't know what event caused it, it was way too significant and sudden to be random. My guess is a load of iPhone users got given a free Apple Music subscription or something like that. The spring of 2013 had crazy sales. Wasn't there a run of #1s that did 200k+ a week? :o
February 20, 20241 yr Biggest shocker is Let's Get Loud at #11, wasnt even a UK single Its probably her signature hit over here
February 21, 20241 yr Surprised that 'Control Yourself' - definitely her best as a feature on a rap single, is only at 15 as it made no.2 and spent 4 weeks in the top 10. But guess May 2006 still had bad sales even though downloads were starting to be counted towards the charts.
February 21, 20241 yr Biggest shocker is Let's Get Loud at #11, wasnt even a UK single Its probably her signature hit over here For me it's her best song.
February 24, 20241 yr Yeah, the absolute peak was in 2013. One week I think in the summer/autumn sales just suddenly collapsed by like 10% compared to the previous year (before that they used to always be up a few percent) and they just kept falling after then. To this day I still don't know what event caused it, it was way too significant and sudden to be random. My guess is a load of iPhone users got given a free Apple Music subscription or something like that. I remember this and it seemed to coincide with a major change that removed streaming limits on the free version of the service, before then (and since about mid-2011) if you listened to a song over five times it wouldn't let you play it anymore, which seems mad now but this is the early streaming days. It definitely marked the point for me when Spotify started to gain traction over iTunes, even though I still use my battered old iPod Nano to this day - still with a load of downloads from a computer that no longer exists. Agreed that these sales seem low but it's very common for this era, it's a shame because I prefer this stuff to the music a decade or two later even though sales/streaming figures are so astronomically different!
February 24, 20241 yr Yeah, the absolute peak was in 2013. One week I think in the summer/autumn sales just suddenly collapsed by like 10% compared to the previous year (before that they used to always be up a few percent) and they just kept falling after then. To this day I still don't know what event caused it, it was way too significant and sudden to be random. My guess is a load of iPhone users got given a free Apple Music subscription or something like that. That’s very interesting! I think I found the week you were referring to http://www.buzzjack.com/forums/index.php?s...t=0&start=0
February 25, 20241 yr There was also mention of it a few weeks later in this thread: http://www.buzzjack.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=158291 Having reached record levels, the singles market seems to have run out of steam recently. Unadjusted sales for the first 39 weeks of 2013 - which exclude the unidentified products that are ultimately added to known products for the official final tallies - are up a mere 0.64% at 131,192,408. Year-to-date album sales are showing more modest declines than in recent years, with a 2013 to-date tally of 59,756,215 - 2.80% down on 2012. Amazingly, the compilation sector has grown 9.36% year-on-year, and accounts for 22.73% of sales, compared to 20.21% at the same stage of 2012. It had been going that way with the odd small year-on-year drops some weeks earlier in 2013, but you're right that it suddenly almost lurched to permanent 10%+ weekly drops. So I think the arguments in this thread that there was some sort of sudden boost to streaming platforms makes a lot of sense. What's maybe more surprising to me is that so many people would have immediately changed their music consumption habits of the last 6/7 years, whatever offer it is that they might have been presented with. Usually it takes years for things to switch over (and indeed it did overall), but this initial change was a bit of a sudden jolt to start with. Edited February 25, 20241 yr by gooddelta
February 25, 20241 yr Spotify started giving free streaming to iPhone & Android users in December 2013. Additionally. it was becoming more and more difficult to pirate music. You also had the likes of Youtube Vevo which was compiling official music videos for artists on their own channels which made listening to music and accessing music videos much easier.
February 25, 20241 yr Wow thanks for the links guys! And I have to say I'm quite impressed by my forecast in the 2nd thread. :lol: Yeah, at the time I think we all knew sales would eventually peak and streaming would take over. But if it happened "organically", like gooddelta says, it would have been a lot more gradual, like a period where the year-on-year sales increases flucuated between like -2% and +2%, then another period where they fluctuated between -5% and 0%, and so on, like a smooth peak and then a smooth transition to a decline. For the drop in sales to be so sudden, something happened. If you plotted all the year-on-year sales increase percentages on a graph for 2013 it would look really unnatural. Like if you saw that pattern on a population graph, you'd assume there'd been some war or disease, if you saw that pattern on a political opinion poll, you'd assume there'd been some scandal or something, if you saw that pattern in a company's stocks there'd be absolute panic in the boardroom that day lol. So I think absolutely something happened. BillyH's idea might be correct. It's the best answer I have of the cause of it. They did give out free Apple Music subscriptions to some iPhone users but I looked into it and the only cases I can find of it happening in 2013 don't coincide with the sales drop, so I don't think it can be that. So yeah, it might be free users getting unlimited plays of songs that convinced a lot of people to ditch downloads for good all at the same time. I think it was a big factor in the OCC adding streaming. I think not long before this they wrote in an article (in response to speculation that they would add streaming like Billboard did) that the singles chart is (and always has been) a sales chart, not a "popularity" chart like the Hot 100, so they won't be adding streaming. But I think when the sales market started dropping (especially so suddenly), they decided to reconsider.
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