Posted on 01/02/2003 10:02:43 PM PST by Clemenza
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Slumping music sales left the recording industry with a whopping New Year's hangover, but rap star Eminem (news - web sites) has plenty to celebrate.
Reuters Photo
Reuters Photo
In a year that saw CD sales overall plunge by nearly 9 percent, the Detroit-based rapper-turned-actor sold 7.6 million copies of his latest album, "The Eminem Show," making it the biggest commercial hit of 2002, according to year-end retail figures issued Thursday by Nielsen SoundScan.
At the same time, the soundtrack to Eminem's movie debut, "8 Mile," ranked No. 5 for the year with nearly 3.5 million units sold.
Featuring songs from Eminem and other recording artists, "8 Mile" also returned Thursday to the top of SoundScan's latest weekly sales chart (ended Dec. 29), dislodging country pop diva Shania Twain (news) from the No. 1 spot for the first time since the debut of her new album "Up!" in late November.
The movie "8 Mile," loosely based on Eminem's life, opened at No. 1 at the U.S. box office in November to generally warm reviews and went on to gross more than $114 million, making the Grammy-winning rapper one of the few recording stars in recent years to successfully cross over to the big screen.
Eminem's double triumph came in a year of music dominated by hip-hop and country music acts, which according to a recent tally by the New York Times jointly accounted for three-fifths of the year's No. 1 rankings on the pop album charts.
Indeed, most of the top 10 albums of 2002 fell into one of those two classes as rap and country encroached further into the pop mainstream. But country music was the only genre to post an increase in sales last year, rising 12 percent over 2001 levels, according to SoundScan.
Industrywide, total album sales fell 8.7 percent from 2001 to nearly 650 million units, the second year-to-year decline in a row. A slump of nearly 3 percent the previous year marked the first sales drop in at least a decade. The major labels have blamed the sluggish economy and online music piracy for weak sales.
Eminem was the only artist in 2002 to surpass the 5 million mark. Fellow rap artist Nelly's "Nellyville" release was No. 2 for the year, with sales of 4.9 million copies, followed by the debut album of Canadian teen pop ingenue Avril Lavigne (news), "Let Go," at No. 3 with sales of 4.1 million units. Country pop trio the Dixie Chicks finished the year in fourth place, selling nearly 3.7 million copies of their latest album, "Home."
Rounding out the top 10 were "Missundaztood" from pop-rocker Pink at No. 6, followed by hip-hop songstress Ashanti's self-titled album, country star Alan Jackson (news)'s "Drive," Shania Twain's "Up!" and the bluegrass-heavy soundtrack to the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"
In terms of market share, Universal Music Group, a unit of Vivendi Universal, continued to lead the pack, accounting for nearly 29 percent of total album sales in 2002. Warner Music, owned by Time Warner Inc., was No. 2 with 15.9 percent market share, followed by Sony Corp (news - web sites)'s Sony Music Entertainment (15.7 percent), Bertelsmann AG (news - web sites)'s BMG (14.8 percent) and EMI Group Plc (news - web sites)'s EMI (8.4 percent). Independent labels accounted for the balance.
An even greater phenomenon to take notice of, however, is how online MP3 download sites are killing CD sales.
This one wasn't bad at all.
Couldn't happen to a nicer industry.
Give me a break! Times change, so does music. There's tons of great music being made in the country genre. You just have to look and listen.
Get over it.
I suppose you didn't like Toby Keith's UNLEASHED? You should go buy the album - it's a winner all the way around.
With 650,000,000 CD sales in 2003, I would hardly consider it a dead industry. If anything, the MP3 sites are propping CD sales up due to the fact that people can discover music that radio will not play. The recording industry has two major problems: There is a lack of new talent being promoted and the prices of their CDs is too high. There is a huge catalog of music I would like to own but I'm not paying $14.98 per CD for it. If the music industry dropped the going rate for a CD to about $4.99, they would sell several billion CDs a year with their existing catalog alone. People want to get the official CDs with the liner notes and the artwork, etc. Homemade CDs are crappy. But so long as pre-recorded CDs are kept so expensive, people will put up with the inferior quality of their homemade CDs. Especially since you can now get a stack of 100 blank CDs for under $20 (less than 20 cents per CD).
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