In The Guardian, lovable imp Alex Petrirdis makes a facetious connection between AC/DC and the economy, showing that the band’s most successful points (such as right now) correspond with negative economic indicators, and their biggest flops come during boom times. He’s kidding, but some people do take this idea seriously. Following the famous idea that hemlines raise during good times and fall during bad, a professor named Terry F. Pettijohn II has argued that people prefer more “meaningful” songs during times of economic crisis:
AC/DC has made an ASCII interpretation of the… More »
This week’s No. 1 album is Kenny Chesney’s bummed-out Lucky Old Sun, which sold 176,000 copies in its first week on shelves–not a bad number by current standards, although slightly off from his 387,000-copy first week total of last fall’s Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates. But as it turns out, the official release date for the album was yesterday, at least, if you’re going by the day on which the plain old, bell-and-whistle-free version of Sun hit stores. It’s a tactic that Sugarland employed earlier this year for the release of Love On The Inside, and to great effect: It came thisclose to outselling Miley Cyrus’ Breakout in its first week. But in these hard times, will people wait for the plain old edition to hit the shops, and cause Chesney to be the rare recipient of a second-week uptick in sales–if they buy it at all?
For all you vinyl fetishists out there, here are a couple of catalog numbers to look up in your collection of vintage 45s: Atlantic 3761, and Atlantic 3787.
From what classic, hit-single-producing Atlantic act could those be? Aretha Franklin, you’re thinking? Maybe Crosby, Stills and Nash? Phil Collins?
Try AC/DC—those are the U.S. release numbers for the 7-inch singles of “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Back in Black.” Both were relased in 1980; both charted on the Billboard Hot 100. Which is proof that they were, in fact, released as singles—songs weren’t allowed to appear on the Hot 100 prior to 1998 unless the public could buy them at retail for a buck or two.
Of course, as you’ve been reading in the press for the past few weeks, Angus Young and his gang of perpetual adolescents aren’t big fans of buck-a-songs anymore. In fact, they view their albums—the latest of which, Black Ice, hits Wal-Mart shelves exclusively on Monday—as indivisible works of art. That’s why they’ve resisted not only Apple’s industry-dominating iTunes Store and its 99-cent-songs policy, but also all requests to release a greatest-hits album.
Accepting, with a straight face, a comparison of the band’s studio albums to Picasso’s oeuvre means buying into the idea that AC/DC can only be appreciated at album length. But a study of the Aussie-Scottish band’s U.S. sales and chart history suggests that AC/DC thrive on hit songs. And their disinclination to release their most beloved songs either a la carte or on a compilation is likely motivated not by pride but by plain fear of the free market.
You’d think it would send chills up Wal-Mart executives’ collective spine to be told they’ve “pulled a page from now-defunct Tower Records playbook,” but nevertheless, that’s the kind of gimmickry going on with the big-box store’s exclusive distribution of the new AC/DC album, Black Ice. Hoping to follow up on their success with the Eagles’ Long Road Out of Eden, the megaretailer has gone even farther, creating a “store within a store” where customers can buy merch and, uh, play Rock Band.
So AC/DC isn’t totally wary of the Internet, as… More »
Yesterday’s New York Times had a story on how AC/DC is standing up against the digital age: The band is putting out Black Ice via brick-and-mortar outlets only next week, with Wal-Mart getting the CD exclusive and indie stores being allowed to sell it on vinyl. Angus Young told the Times that his band’s resistance to going digital was rooted in the idea of iTunes selling chunks of albums instead of full-length records: “It’s like an artist who does a painting… If he thinks it’s a great piece of work, he protects it. It’s the same thing: this is our work.” Well, someone in the chain of getting the album to stores didn’t quite get the memo on AC/DC’s analog ways, or maybe they just found it hypocritical that AC/DC was OK with selling single songs as ringtones, but not as 99-cent downloads, because Black Ice leaked last week, and according to estimates, it’s been downloaded some 400,000 times from BitTorrent alone.
ARTIST: AC/DC
TITLE: Black Ice
RELEASE DATE: Oct. 20, 2008
WEB DEBUT: Oct. 7, 2008
An Australian news outlet is reporting that the number of trans-Pacific orders for AC/DC’s forthcoming album Black Ice has gone way up, and that there’s one culprit: American independent record stores, which apparently have the capital to bank on Ice being in-demand enough to result in people willingly paying import prices for the record, just for the sake of supporting indie record stores! Yeah!
It seems like just a few months ago when we complimented Harmonix audio director Eric Brosious for his company’s stance against artist exclusive deals. Back in those halcyon days of August, Brosious said of the possibility of bands signing exclusive deals with Rock Band, “We prefer not to sign exclusive deals with artists because while it seems like the competitive ‘business’ thing to do, in the long run, it’s really not good for anyone. We think we should be working to get more music out to more people.” Well, August was a long time ago, and when Angus Young calls, you pick up the phone.
