THE NEW MUSICAL BOX

A ROCKING GOOD WORLD?

Rock music took the lion's share of album sales in the UK last year, according to figures released today by the BPI.

Over a third of all sales were categorised by the BPI as rock (33.8%) with pop coming a close second on 31%. This might sound like good news for those who love their muscular guitar bands, but we do need to dig into the figures a little more to see what's really going on.

Firstly, as we have come to expect, total albums sales continued their slight decline by coming in at 94 million units, down 6.4% on 2012. Perhaps more of a concern was that for the first time in over 30 years, no single album sold more than a million copies, underlining once again the growing move by down-loaders to cherry-pick songs rather than buy the whole album. No doubt the economic situation has a part to play, but also - as I have written before - consumers like to listen to their music in all manner of ways, not always involving an actual song or album purchase.

Emile Sande - Continued sales success
in 2014

On the surface, it does look as if the clock has turned back somewhat with regard to the success of the various musical genres. Rock sales up at the apparent expense of pop, classical, R&B and folk. But, the genre categories do seem woolly and narrow and those charged with allocating albums to genres are more than a little inconsistent. Mumford & Sons are surely not a rock act (folk-rock, folk-pop) and neither is Rod Stewart these days. Strip those sales out, and the headline doesn't look so catchy as rock sales would have fallen. The biggest selling albums of 2013 were surely either pop or dance orientated - we just need to look at Daft Punk's Random Access Memories or Emile Sande's continuing success with Our Version Of Events for evidence of that. But, there's no doubting the success of The Arctic Monkeys with AM, their best album in a while and most definitely a rock release. 

The Arctic Monkeys - These boys rocked in 2013 

Excavating further through various geological strata, the rock category is even more interesting. Half of all rock sales were "contemporary rock", but something over 20% of them - over 6 million albums - were "Metal/Heavy", a genre which doesn't get much publicity or  mainstream radio coverage. It just goes to show that for hardcore fans, fashion and being contemporary just doesn't play a part in the album-buying process.   

Heavy Metal - Still selling after all these years

If we take a look at the trends over the past five years, it's interesting to note that in many ways, the slice of the pie allocated to each genre hasn't changed that much. The pie itself may be slightly smaller, but the proportions don't vary hugely. The message from the five-year figures (see table below) is that rock is declining slightly, pop continues to grow, R&B has halved whilst pleasingly, blues has doubled. The rest of the genres fluctuate within fairly narrow parameters.

If we also look at the singles charts, as might be expected, the longer-term trends are more marked and it's clear that pop is on an upward curve whilst rock has lost a third of its market since 2008. 

ALBUM SALES BY TYPE OF MUSIC (% UNITS)

Will this be true in 2014?

It'll be interesting to see what happens this year: there are some big album releases coming and one thing I'd wager is that the growth in vinyl album sales will continue - even if total sales takes a further gentle slide.

With an improving economy, some stability in the market and a fair wind, it might even be a bonanza year.

Alan Dorey

12th February 2014