On Thursday 21st August 1997 Oasis released their third album, Be Here Now. As befitted their status as the biggest rock band in the world at the time, it was an album which saw a phenomenal level of demand. It sold 356,000 copies on its first day alone and 696,000 copies by the weekend: the highest single-week sale achieved by any album in UK chart history ever – and all in just three days (rather than the usual six or seven).
This was the all-time peak of the CD album, a genuine high watermark in consumer demand.
Last week, the number one album was a collection of songs from the 1930s and 1940s sung by a 73-year-old man whose career began in the 1960s. Bob Dylan’s Shadows In The Night sold just 22,031 copies to beat the rest of the market to the top of the charts. Meanwhile, lower down, the eighth biggest selling album of the week was a 30-year-old release by a long-defunct rock band (8,890 people bought Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits last week, mostly because Google Play was essentially giving away downloads at 99p a time).
While albums by the biggest names of the moment can still move product (Adele’s 21 is still fresh in the mind) nobody is immune to the winds of change. When Take That stormed to number one with III last December its first week sale of 144,358 was impressive. But put it in contrast to the 518,601 that was sold by its predecessor, Progress, when that was first released just four years earlier, and you’ll see it is a relatively negligible figure.
It’s not as if their fans had gone away. The recent number one single that the group landed had proved people were still interested in them. They’d just moved on to other ways to appreciate their idols’ brand new music.
Last week in the UK, the total size of the album market was 1,204,723. The same week five years ago saw 2,034,416 purchases. That’s almost half the market, evaporated and vanished in the blink of an eye. If you know someone who used to run a record shop you may now understand why they don’t any more.
Yet there is one section of the market for music consumption that is booming – and that’s streaming.
The new digital age has further diluted the whole picture of what precisely makes “an album”. If you define it as a collection of songs by a single artist under a common title, fine. That continues to exist. And though the idea of a physically packaged CD album will never totally die (just as vinyl sales still chug along to a hardcore of aficionados), there is a generation is growing up that will never ‘own’ the music they consume.
This lack of physicality is changing the acts’ approach to albums too. For many, the collection of songs that make up their album is something that can be tweaked, remixed, added to and repackaged in an ever-growing array of Deluxe, Special, Version 2.0, Single, Double and Bonus editions. It means that, in many cases, the album you bought on the day of release may only bear a passing resemblance to the one you buy for a relative a few months down the line at Christmas.
To a CD-buying audience, this is a nightmare (and an expensive one at that). But this fluidity of form is appealing to streamers. A new remix comes out, a remastered version, a bonus track – you can stream those too as soon as they’re available.
The way both creators and consumers are choosing to make music these days lends itself much better to streaming. Hence the announcement in the last few days that the Official UK Album chart is to encompass streaming data in much the same way that its bigger brother, the singles chart, did last summer.
While streams of individual songs will continue to register for the singles chart, collected streams of tracks from the same album will now be totalled up and combined with downloaded and physical purchases, albeit in a slightly more convoluted manner than we are used to.
This is mainly to avoid a problem that befell the Billboard 200 (the chart of album sales in America), which introduced streaming at the end of last year and, by common assent, got it totally wrong. The problem is that many albums are defined by one or two super-hits, the core tracks that have become big hit singles and which people return to again and again. This is an unrepresentative skew and, left uncorrected, will leave us with an album chart that starts to closely mirror the singles chart (as both charts are essentially tracking the same thing).
Hence the brand new look album chart will log streams according to a specific set of criteria. Only the 12 most popular tracks from “the standard version of the album” will count. Streams of the two largest (presumed to be the hit singles) will be down-weighted in line with the average of the rest with the new totals then combined with sales data on a 1:1,000 ratio. In other words, an album will have to receive 1,000 weighted streams of any combination of its tracks to register the equivalent of one purchased sale.
Yet the music industry must be careful not to rush headlong into creating an album-free world. If you look at the best-selling albums of last year, they do still resemble a set of what people would call “proper” albums. There might not be that many big albums any more, but one thing streaming does seem to help a handful of artists maintain a really very long tail of success.
Following on from Dylan’s brief sojourn at the top of the charts, we once again find Sam Smith at number one, closely followed by Ed Sheeran. In The Lonely Hour has spent 38 weeks in the chart. X is now in its 35th week there. Just behind them in the top five is George Ezra’s Waiting On Voyage, after 33 weeks. Slightly further down, you find that there are only 20 albums in the UK that are currently outselling Emeli Sandé’s Our Version of Events. Which was released just over three years ago.
Last summer’s singles chart changes taught us that the effect of this new data on the chart listings might actually be quite limited. This is a process of evolution rather than revolution and is simply a case of the methods of chart compilation being ahead of the curve and anticipating what is sure to be a growing trend.
Those who still sit coveting their extensive CD and LP collections will doubtless once more see it as the end of days and a further nail in the coffin of whatever traditions they believe the music industry should cling to, but technology marches on. A new album chart is a crucial step along that road.
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Streams of album tracks will be incorporated as from February 23rd, the first such chart published on March 1st. Number One will be Ed Bloody Sheeran again won’t it? We just know it.