" and being plastered all over the media everywhere, her new Teenage Dream 
album managed to sell just 192,000 copies the first week out, and only a bit under 39,000 the second week. 10 years ago it would've been a couple of million.The reason? For one thing, Katy's over-exposed as she's literally everywhere. She's in the news, she's on cover of magazines, she's on the radio; you name it, Katy's there. If you're not a huge fan, you're sick of her. But while that used to be a recipe for massive success in the days before Music 3.0
and was the way that major labels did business, today it's just a blip on the radar of a stratified audience.Katy is a singles artist, which means she'll have no longevity after her flavor of the month passes out of favor, if her album sales are any indicator. It's true that she sold 259,000 digital downloads of her latest single "Teenage Dream,
" but that just doesn't bring in a lot of dough these days. It's albums that are the big moneymakers, and like Rihanna and Ke$ha, big singles sales and lots of exposure doesn't necessarily turn into the album sales that pay a label's bills.It appears that the formula of the major labels is no longer the key to music success, even on the Katy level (although we knew that already). Maybe we are making some progress after all.
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1 comment:
If this was 10 years ago, Katy would have been dropped from her label with 2nd week sales of 39k. This is a great example of the record industry being really good at exposure but having no idea what to do with it once they get it.
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