Supersonic September Surge To Save Sales From Slump?

jharv | August 31, 2007 9:30 am

The music industry certainly thinks/hopes so according to this Variety article about the jam-packed September release schedule, with a bargeload of new releases set to drop on the (hopefully) golden Tuesdays of Sept. 11 and 25. The shortlist of artists namechecked here as potential moneymakers includes the super-obvious (Kanye, 50, Kenny, Rascal Flatts), the second-tier pretty-damn-obvious (Foo Fighters, Barry Manilow [don’t front, dude does huge numbers with the crucial over-50 set]), the third-tier obvious (Chris Botti [ditto Manilow], Melissa Etheridge), and then a whole lot of discs that will probably do well over time or make up the slack come Christmas and the crit polls/awards shows (Seal, PJ Harvey, Miles Davis reissues, etc.). But save the first four, there don’t seem to be any with the grease of last year’s unholy September sales triumverate (Justin, Beyonce, Fergie), and it’s arguable/possible that none of this year’s crop will best them. And that might be why the labels are looking to singles to make up the sales slack rather than just as a promotional push:

While this year’s sales week that includes Labor Day is unlikely to generate a 100,000-unit seller beyond “High School Musical 2,” the industry is hoping to better the September sales tally of the last two years, about 39 million. Timberlake has last year’s September best opening, 684,000, followed by Beyonce’s debut week of 541,000. (Reflecting the sales slump in microcosm, Timberlake’s album is still in the top 40 a year later although it has sold fewer than 3 million copies since that first week).

In reality, though, the sorts of artists now in the September fray have the potential to drive the singles market, especially with kids back in school. The year has already seen a 48% rise in the sale of single downloads this year: 538.4 million through the first eight months vs. 365 million at the same time last year.

For some artists — Bruce Springsteen, Annie Lennox and Matchbox Twenty among them — their singles are being released outside of the sales quarter in which their albums hit stores. Those three, plus John Fogerty and Merle Haggard, have albums being released Oct. 2.

The feeling seems to be that the goal is now reducing/reversing the sales slump as a whole, rather than hoping on any one artist’s album to expand any one label’s wallet. You can’t quite call it banding together in the face of adversity, since these are still corporations with an eye on their own bottom line, but this presentation of even a semi-united front would have been almost unthinkable in the every-exec-for-himself days of only a decade ago. (Without the benefit of clips from the time, I can only guess this “we can do it!” approach is how the industry has presented itself at other times of internal crisis over the decades.) And because it’s doubtful at this point that PJ Harvey or Merle Haggard or even Kanye are going to turn things around on their own, a scaling back of expectations, a “save the patient vs. fixing any one particular organ” philosophy, might be the industry’s best bet.

Music Dancing In September [Variety]