The suspense! The slaughter! What we learned from the download chart
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Version 0 of 1. There was no party. Champagne went unpopped. Sombre talking heads were not wheeled out for a special on BBC Four. Yet last week was a significant anniversary in the UK charts – where legal downloads, then a bewildering new “format”, were incorporated into the full UK singles chart. There was an uncomfortable period of conditional cohabitation, where downloads could qualify for inclusion only if they had a concurrent physical release. This was soon scrapped, with Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy becoming the first song to get to No 1 in the UK on downloads alone in April 2006. A decade on, the game is not quite up for downloads, but the wheels are certainly falling off – the charabanc is heading for the ditch. As we have not come to bury the download chart; instead we shall remember what it has taught us. Downloads saved the single 2003 was the lowest point ever for the singles chart in the UK. That year, just over 30m singles were sold, a drop from almost 44m the year before. In 1985, there were 82m single sales in the UK. Legal downloading was the lifeline the singles market desperately needed and the turnaround it created was swift. By the end of 2005, single sales were just shy of 48m. Every year after that saw exhilarating growth to the point where 188m singles were sold in 2012, with downloading accounting for 97% of them. Hurrah! The single was saved! Except it wasn’t. As we will see. Sunday became the holiest day for the charts The record industry previously ran on a logic of two sales peaks in the chart week for singles – Mondays when new singles were released, and Saturdays when singles-buyers got their pocket money and went shopping. In 2004, 21.1% of all singles sales happened on a Saturday and 19.7% happened on Mondays. By 2011, 17.9% of singles were being sold on Sundays compared with 13.9% on Mondays and 16% on a Saturday. What had happened with downloading was essentially the addition of an extra sales day. On the seventh day, the record industry did not rest – it rubbed its hands in fiscal anticipation. iTunes killed the suspense of the chart reveal Unless you worked in the music industry, midweek chart positions were never something you could see. The new chart was announced on Radio 1 on Sunday afternoon, so that was when you found out who the climbers, fallers and non-movers were. The impact of downloads’ inclusion in the chart was immediate – going from a standing start to making up 55% of a singles sales by the end of 2005. By 2007, this share was up to 89.6%. While there are a number of chart-eligible retailers out there, it really all boiled down to one name – iTunes. It is, by some margin, the biggest download store and it also publishes charts each day of what is selling. So, give or take a few sales, you just needed to go to the iTunes homepage to see who was doing what in the charts. Overnight, the Sunday chart reveal lost its potency and excitement. There is a line of argument that the slow death of Top of the Pops killed the public’s interest in the singles chart. It didn’t. Apple did. The revival of the single came at the expense of the album The music industry calls it “unbundling” and “cherrypicking”, but it basically means that consumers can buy any song they want from an album. That also means, if an album is stuffed with stinkers, you don’t have to stump up for the full album and can instead pay for the one or two tracks that are any good. Add into this customer star ratings for tracks on iTunes, and that only exacerbates the situation where undecided buyers will follow what’s selling most rather than take a wild punt on a full album. In 2005, album sales stood at 158.9m. By 2013, album sales were down to 94m. Downloading was like a blood transfusion for the singles market. Unfortunately, the blood came from the albums market, which is now slowly desiccating. Absolutely anything is a single now In the days when a singles chart was made up of CD, cassette and vinyl sales, the record industry decided what was and what wasn’t a single. Record labels carefully structured the “plot” for album campaigns, loftily proclaiming what the sequence of singles would be and when they would “drop”. They then had to physically manufacture the records and get them into the shops on a certain date, coordinating poster campaigns and TV appearances accordingly. Now the public can decide what a single is – for example, a track that appears in an ad or TV show can, in theory, enter the charts if enough people download it. This reached its apex (or nadir, depending on your stance) in December 2009, when a Facebook campaign got Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name Of to No 1 instead of The Climb by X Factor winner Joe McElderry. Forget the general election, this is what passes for democracy today. Downloads killed the B-side No need to pad out a 7-inch or CD single with a shonky studio offcut, a mediocre live track or a terrible, naged-out remix by a famous DJ! Downloads don’t have “sides” so the rigmarole of making B-side is now redundant. In my opinion, this is a good thing. Despite talk about the Smiths or Suede doing amazing B-sides that were better than the A-side, most extra tracks put on physical singles were, frankly, rubbish. The saviour becomes the slaughtered 2012 will be seen as the high-water mark for downloads: in that year, a total of 188.5m singles were sold, almost all of them downloads. The following year saw the singles market drop for the first time since the format was introduced, slipping to 182m.That figure will continue to fall, especially as consumers increasingly realise they don’t want their computer hard drive stuffed with MP3s when they can stream anything they want. The inclusion of streaming into the singles chart last year was done partly to give the chart a new sense of relevance, but, really, what it is doing is distracting from the fact that the download is an increasingly moribund format that will just slide further and further into irrelevance. The speed of change is such that chart years are best understood as operating like dog years. Soon, the once-loved download will be taken away to scamper with the cassingle, the eight-track, the MiniDisc and all other deceased formats in Format Heaven. |