Long after country contemporary Blake Shelton dropped off the charts, Levine remains dominant.
With the exception of Adele’s impossible-to-kill 21, albums have been leaping to Number One, then dropping off, all year – speaking, perhaps, to loyal fans’ willingness to buy new product immediately, while second-tier fans wait to download the thing for free.ĪDAM LEVINE, KING OF SOME MEDIA: How big was NBC’s The Voice in restarting Maroon 5’s faltering career? The pop-rock band had been struggling to sell both albums and concert tickets until this summer, when Adam Levine turned out to be the show’s tattooed everyman. And while Lil Wayne’s new Tha Carter IV sold all 964,000 copies in its debut week without any kind of dramatic price cut, it still drops 77 percent this week, selling just 219,000 copies, but maintaining Number One. Amazon pumped artificial sales steroids into Lady Gaga’s Born This Way earlier this year, offering it online for just 99 cents, absorbing the hit financially while helping the album sell 1.11 million copies in its first week – and then it dropped 84 percent in the second week.
Given the Detroit market these days, that’s probably enough for another big house for Bob. If he gets 50 percent under the newly defined licensing royalty, that’s a little more than $12,000 – in a week. Apple takes about 30 percent of that, which leaves about $25,000. If he sold that many copies of a $9.99 iTunes download, that’s $35,390 in revenue. We have no idea what Seger’s actual contracts say, but let’s do some fantasy math: His Greatest Hits sold 3,539 copies during a random week in June, according to Nielsen Soundscan. Why are all these stubborn stars caving to iTunes all of a sudden? One possible answer is that artists are seeing dollar signs after the Eminem court victory earlier this year, which declared iTunes to be “licensing” rather than “sales” revenue for artists – so Seger would get 50 percent of every sale rather than 12. Plus, Aerosmith recently reissued all of its albums from 1973 to 1987, including classics Toys In the Attic and Rocks, via iTunes, and Bob Seger announced earlier this week that he would finally end his reign as one of the download service’s biggest holdouts. Thanks to a $9.99 deal, 1 was Number Two on iTunes, after Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter IV.
The Beatles, who made their long-delayed iTunes debut late last year with much fanfare, released their modern greatest-hits album 1 on iTunes this week, selling 60,000 copies (compared to 1,000 the previous week) and hitting Number Four on the overall charts.