The music industry tells us that they only sell what people will buy, but that is tosh, people are walking away in droves.
Here is why I think this,
The number of individual copies, not albums or complilations or dvd’s or any other multi-artist or multi-track format, needed to get a gold disc used to be 1million, now its only 50k in the UK.
The reason is that sales are falling and the industry uses the ‘gold standard’ as a promotional thing to sell more or enhance the reputation of the artist, whereas when you sold a million copies that was an achievement in itself not a means of selling more.
With such small numbers of copies of a track sold, and this track can be part of a compilation such as a film soundtrack, or holiday mix soundtrack or whatever, it means that targeted marketing can have a very profound influence on the chart position of a song, one way is to heavily discount a particular song.
To maintain control over this targeted marketing the industry prepares and selects its artists very carefully, note these are not the public doing the selecting.
The result is that the artists are aimed at such a small segment of the population that they are all too similar, boy/girl bands especially.
It affects other artists who now have to hone themselves to a far narrower audiences which results in highly formulaic products and bands that are just cliches with no surprises, no exploration, no experimentation and little to say.
The sales of new music as individual copies, or single artists has never been lower in the UK yet old stuff continues to shift in shedloads.
I go into the music shops in Leeds, England and find they are all but empty during the week and jam packed with teenies at the weekend buying the latest teenie thing. Although these are major major outlets they look desparate places during normal weekdays, like closing down shops.
It used to be considered that the staying power of an artist was not in the speed their material went up the charts but how long it remained there throughout its run, Engleburt Humperdink’s - ‘My Way’ was in the UK chart for 56 consecutive weeks in 1967 and sold humungously but nowadays a top range artist can be in, hit the top spot, and out again in less then a month so there is little chance that such a song will bind itself into the popular imagination.
Look at the album charts and the differance is even more striking, with some great ones hanging around for decades whereas the recent company products stick around about as long as a placard carrying KKK member at a Black Panther meeting.
All this is symptomatic of an industry that does not promote and sell music that inspires the public, there are exceptions of course, but it seems that by pushing to us the stuff that the music industry has manufactured rather than what we the public feels reaches our lives and inspires us, popular culture is a poorer place and sales of new music continues to fall and becomes less and less relevant.
BTW I think Oasis is terribly derivative and fomulaic, the pundits say that there are virtual Beatles rips-off among their songs but I can spot near enough copies of Kinks, and Mersey band sounds, they are nothing like as original as some folk think, they have very little wit, they have very little to say and say it badly, but they have attitude, nothing else.
Not to sound conceited or anything.