Bob Baker's Indie Music Promotion Blog

News, notes and ideas on music marketing, self-promotion, artist empowerment and more

April 27, 2007

Hits Suffer, Niches Bloom

Music Week in the UK reported some revealing stats about music sales in the first three months of 2007:

MW's detailed study of quarter one trading patterns indicates that, while sales of the Top 200 sellers plummeted year-on-year by more than 20%, the rest of the market dropped by little more than 3%. It indicates that, as the top titles suffer the biggest falls in a clearly tough market, sales are being spread out more widely across a greater number of titles.

This is a fascinating trend. The top 200 albums sold 21.1% fewer copies than they did during the first quarter of 2006. But when you take the top 200 albums out of the equation, the rest of the sales list was down just 3.3%.

And here's the coolest part:

Furthermore, OCC data indicates that, despite the generally poor state of the artist albums market, sales of the 5,001st to 9,999th best-selling artist albums in Q1 2007 increased 11.8% year-on-year.

That's right. Sales of music further down the chart -- where more obscure artists and indie acts reside -- actually grew!

-Bob

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