So, after all the advance hype which led to disappointing sales numbers which led to people pointing their fingers toward Axl Rose for not promoting Chinese Democracy at all, the blame game surrounding the long-delayed Guns N’ Roses album has finally focused in on… Dr Pepper! Yes, the soft-drink pushers, which offered the world a (coupon for a) free sample of its beverage in honor of Chinese Democracy‘s release date, got into a bit of (uncarbonated) hot water when the Web site it created for the promotion crashed under the stress of all those people who weren’t buying Axl’s album trying to wring their free soda out of it. Axl’s lawyers whipped off a letter saying that the stunt was “a complete fiasco.” (I’d think that in the grand scheme of things, the decision to go with the clowns at Best Buy for the exclusive distribution of a piece of recorded music, and not, say, a flat-screen TV, was the biggest fiasco of all, but who asked me, right?) What does Dr Pepper have to say about it?
The hand-wringing over Kanye West’s and Guns N’ Roses’ disappointing sales figures last week has begun, and lots of fingers seem to be pointing toward the economy, the decline of the music industry as a whole, and Axl Rose’s reclusive nature. But should someone maybe point out that people aren’t buying the discs because they heard them already and felt like they could live without the return of Axl and the rise of Autotune?
If anyone in the music business was hoping that the one-two punch of a holiday weekend and big-name releases would magically convince people to pay for music one last time, they may want to pour themselves a stiff drink, or at least spike their morning latte: Billboard is reporting that the No. 1 album, Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak, sold 425,000-450,000 copies over the course of last week, while Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy woefully underperformed, moving between 250,000 and 260,000 copies during its first week on Best Buy’s shelves. And that’s not all: Depending on who you ask, overall music sales were down anywhere between 10% and 30% when compared with last year’s holiday weekend, although online numbers were OK. Meanwhile, a UK tabloid is claiming that bigwigs at Universal Music Group are blaming the soft landing of Chinese Democracy squarely on Axl, because he didn’t do enough press for the album. Even though it probably received more free press than any other record this year. Yeah, it couldn’t be that people currently see Guns N’ Roses as something of a novelty act, and that people who liked Appetite probably aren’t so into the new sound, and that even those people who wanted to give Axl a shot were a bit weirded out by the whole preserved-in-1999-amber feel of the final recorded product, could it?
While flipping through the Best Buy circular that came with this weekend’s New York Times, I noticed something kind of odd: There wasn’t one mention of Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy anywhere within, despite the album still being exclusively available at the big blue retailer. All the premium music-selling real estate—the album-cover shots in proffered iPods, etc.—was instead given over mostly to Britney Spears’ Circus, which I can understand on one level (a pretty girl being like a melody and all), but which doesn’t make sense given that the Guns deal was supposedly a big-money transaction for Best Buy, and that the endlessly speculated-about album reportedly didn’t break the half-million mark as far as its first-week sales went.
A.K.A the secret story of how you almost didn’t get to hear the new Guns N’ Roses album, after all. As told to Jess Harvell by Axl himself. (No, I swear.)
Music-biz rag Hits has more on that “controversial SoundScan ruling” that is causing Chinese Democracy‘s first-week sales to be held until next week’s charts, despite its first day of iTunes sales falling under this week’s chart’s purview: “Soundscan has clarified the In order not to separate out the album’s ‘first-week’ sales into two separate charts, and under considerable muscle from GNR’s label IGA, SoundScan has agreed to ‘hold the digital sales of any album which has a physical counterpart in order to accommodate first-week charting.’ ” Just as I expected–including the part about the “considerable muscle” from Axl’s label! It’s nice to see that some things about the music business haven’t changed in the digital era.
You may be wondering how first-day sales of Guns N’ Roses” Chinese Democracy went, and… well, no one’s really sure, thanks to lots of retail secrecy! Hits has the very first, very wild estimates: “After yesterday’s first-day sales, which include a reported 25k downloads at iTunes, first-week sales prognostications are ranging anywhere from 300-500k.” Those of us who figured that the album’s Sunday release date on Best Buy and iTunes meant that it would show up on this Wednesday’s album chart were wrong, thanks to the combination of something that Hits is calling “a recent controversial SoundScan ruling about counting digital sales” and Best Buy’s own Sunday-to-Saturday sales-reporting policies, which were outlined way back when the album’s release date was announced in October:
Finally, some Chinese Democracy sales numbers! More »
