R&B sales slide alarms music biz
Some music merchandisers are alarmed by an accelerated decline in R&B sales — the broad category that also includes rap and hip-hop, Billboard magazine reports.
With the exception of new age, the smallest genre tracked by Nielsen SoundScan, R&B and rap suffered the biggest declines in 2006 of all styles of music.
R&B, with album scans of 117 million units, was down 18.4% from 2005, while the rap subgenre’s 59.5 million scans were down 20.7%. Total U.S. album sales fell 4.9% to 588.2 million units.
Since 2000, total album sales have slid 25%, but R&B is down 41.4% and rap down 44.4%. In 2000, R&B accounted for 25.4% of total album sales, and rap 13.6%. In 2006, their respective shares fell to nearly 20% and 10%.
Looking for specific causes, merchants attribute hip-hop and rap albums’ accelerating decline to their increasingly short life span.
“Rap used to be the flavor of the month, and then it became the flavor of the week and then the day, and now it’s the flavor of the moment,” says Hinsul Lazo, owner of Miami-based H.L. Distributors.
Merchants point to large second-week declines in new albums. For example, Jay-Z’s 2006 “Kingdom Come” album debuted with 680,000 units in its first week and then dropped nearly 80%, to almost 140,000 units.
In general, “rap sales are really changing course,” one senior distribution executive says. “If you look at the second-week drop-off, it used to be 50% and now it is 70%.”
Retailers and executives say they believe that CD burning is a growing phenomenon in the rap/hip-hop community.
“Downloading and Internet file sharing is a problem and the labels are really late in fixing it,” Czar Entertainment CEO and manager of the Game Jimmy Rosemond says. “With an artist like Game, his album leaked before it came out, and I had 4 million people downloading it.”
Meanwhile, the head of an independent label that issues rap suggests that labels’ changing approaches to promoting hip-hop are cutting into sales as well.
“Rap is becoming a very difficult genre to make a profit in because marketing costs have become increasingly expensive,” that executive says. “With the shortened life span of rap albums, we now see albums only do three or four times first-week sales during the life of a project, where it used to be five times. That subtle shift can mean all the difference.”
In 2006, the best-selling rap album was T.I.’s “King,” which sold 1.6 million copies, while the best-selling R&B album was Beyonce’s “B’Day,” which moved 1.8 million units. But those are exceptions. Between eroding profits and the shorter life span, most labels no longer push a second single from a rap project, the independent label head says.
“We need to go back to 10 years ago,” adds Coach K, the manager of Young Jeezy. “These labels are signing way too many people without developing them.”
Digital distribution may be cutting into album sales as well. Between “ringtones and downloads, people don’t have to buy the whole album anymore — just the music they want,” says Troy Marshall, VP of rap promotion at Interscope.
Earlier this year, Sony BMG reported that some of its acts are drawing most of their revenue from ringtone, track and song bundle sales. In the case of Jive Records rapper T-Pain, 43% of revenue came from ringtones alone.
A senior executive at one major label says ringtone revenue now exceeds track download revenue. And since Nielsen RingScan started tracking master ringtones in September, rap and R&B have comprised 87% of scans generated by the top 10 sellers.
Interscope’s Marshall points out that Jibbs, for example, “has sold an incredible 1.4 million ringtones” — a figure that might well offset lost album revenue. The rapper has moved 196,000 units of his “Jibbs Feat. Jibbs” album since its October 24 release. But figuring the ringtones he’s sold at $2 apiece translates into $2.8 million in revenue, the equivalent of another 233,000 albums at a wholesale cost of $12 per unit.
And, Marshall adds, Chamillionaire has moved more than 3 million ringtones on top of scanning nearly 900,000 units of his “Sound of Revenge” album.
“That’s probably one of the biggest success stories the industry has seen,” Marshall says. “Consumers are buying into him as a brand. It’s more than just about the album.”
A senior distribution executive, while acknowledging that R&B and rap are currently in decline, reminds that music trends are cyclical. For instance, while country was hot for most of the ’90s, he says, it then fell out of favor and is now back in vogue again. Indeed, country music is up 9.3% since 2000.
Reuters/Billboard
