To put all these figures in perspective Adele’s album 21 sold more copies in its tenth week in the charts (257,731) than both the Foo Fighters and Arctic Monkeys sold in their first week combined (196, 981)! Proof, not only that today’s rock bands are struggling to keep pace with other genres, but proof that the downward trend is not irreversible; if enough people have access to, and are interested in your music, it will sell. Adele is breaking sales records across the world, Lady Gaga is smashing download records consistently; the idea that you can’t sell albums in the Internet age is a myth, the market may be shrinking but failure is anything but inevitable.
Rock’s downward spiral is underlined by a dangerous trend in our collective purchasing patterns. As the music critic Simon Reynolds excellently evidences in his latest work Retromania… catalogue (sales of albums five years old or more) now out sells new music by a ratio of more than 2:1. A complete reversal of music history, which always favoured current/new music up and till the 1990s when catalogue sales began to increase, but it wasn’t until this decade that the past overtook the future. Sadly, since catalogue took the lead, the gap has steadily increased with every passing year.
What makes this issue uniquely troubling for rock and guitar is music is the fact that while new pop, rap and dance acts still outsell the past on a track by track and album by album basis (Gaga, Adele, Rihanna, Kanye West, Pendulum all out sell any singular past release from any one genre), guitar bands like The Strokes and Kings Of Leon not only see their sales dwindling but they sit behind Journey in the singles charts and Rolling Stones’ reissues in the first week album sales department. Dammingly even with catalogue sales factored in rock saw it’s market share reduced by over 5% now representing less than a quarter of total sales (24.5%) of past or present releases.
Finally, we often console ourselves by saying; who cares if music sales are down $1.5bn world wide, when live attendances are booming. It’s something that all rock fans take solace in. If you want to see great new music, it’s all around you, selling out all our small and medium sized academies. The only problem is that, at the top level, where the big boys play, where the generation defining icons make their mark, the rock stars are absent.
While Rihanna, Britney Spears and Katy Perry stand shoulder to shoulder with the stars of yester year. Only Arctic Monkeys share arena space with Roger Waters, Rush and Iron Maiden in the big arenas. It’s as though Muse, Arctic Monkeys and Kings Of Leon rotate, taking their once yearly chance to play London’s O2 Arena while a never ending conveyer belt of new rappers, popstars and dance technicians ascend the world’s biggest stages.
In part two of our investigation of Guitar Music in Crisis we discuss why rock music has fallen out of the popular culture, and more importantly, why we should care.
