2014 First Year Ever Without A Platinum Album

With all the albums that have come out this year it's pretty amazing that exactly zero have been certified platinum by the RIAA. Yes, you read that right - there have been no million selling albums this year yet!

What's worse, it doesn't look like there will be any by the end of the year either. The two closest are Beyonce's self-titled album and Lorde's Pure Heroine, but both aren't even reached the 800,000 mark yet and their sales have slowed in recent months.

Actually, there has been one million seller - the soundtrack to Frozen has sold over 3 million, but that's a soundtrack and not a popular artist.

Back when the business was at its peak, there might have been 20 to 30 million sellers by this time just about every year (both recent releases and catalog), but those days are long gone.

On the other hand, there have been 60 platinum songs so far this year, but even that's down about 20% from last year, as the music consumer moves to streaming instead of purchase.

Yes, we're definitely in a singles era where the song is vastly more important than the album, but we're also in a very important YouTube era where a song can get 100 million views yet sell less than 10,000 copies. And today, that's considered a bit hit.

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How Spotify Helps A Song Become A Hit

The other day Spotify director of economic development Will Page showed some data about how the service can be front and center in helping a song become a hit, using Lorde's "Royals" as an example.

The gist of the example is that playlists are one of the primary reasons that a song takes off on Spotify. When people add a song to a playlist they create, it's almost the same as word-of-mouth in that other people check out the song and potentially add it to their lists as well.

As with so many hits these days, that can help a song get a groundswell, but it takes a celebrity or someone with high visibility to add it to their playlist for the song to explode. In the case of "Royals" it was Spotify's Sean Parker who added it to his Hipster International list which pushed the song to hit status almost overnight.

The interesting thing here is that this is really no different from hit making on radio going back to the 50s. If a DJ started playing a song in a major or secondary city, the song would begin to break out as other DJs would add it to their playlists because it was suddenly got hot.

The fact of the matter is that it still requires some sort of a unexpected break for a song to become a hit, it's just that the break now may come online instead of over the air.

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