Low Album Sales

Maybe you heard that in the last week of October, Album sales fell to their lowest total since the Soundscan era started in 1991.

This is really no surprise.  Streaming services have begun to take over.  Consumers are still buying songs instead of full albums.  Even though single track downloads are down, too.

There were headlines about the recent Elton John and Paul McCartney albums tanking.  Again, who's surprised by this.  Elton stopped selling records the minute he stopped having hit singles.  McCartney promoted his new one to death and while it's better than Elton's there no single on it to get radio interested.

Big sales are still targeted for release week, but after that it seems record companies have no plan.  Just try to keep pumping out singles and hoping the audience decides to splurge on the album rather than the single.

The album is dying talk continues to build momentum.  But what other options are there?  Musicians still like to release musical statements.  But most never learned the lesson of the CD era.  Very few have over an hour of good music in them to fill up a CD.