iTunes under threat as bands take their business elsewhere
Bands concerned for the ongoing commercial viability of albums are adding to the pressures on iTunes, says Brian Boyd
The
previously unremarkable rap-rocker Kid Rock had a huge worldwide hit
this summer with the single All Summer Long. The album it came from,
Rock'n'Roll Jesus, has now sold more than two million copies.
It
didn't escape the attention of his record label, Warners, that Kid
Rock's career-high sales have been amassed without the single or album
being available on Apple's iTunes music store.
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Since
its introduction in 2003, iTunes has sold more than five billion songs
and is now the biggest music retailer in the US. In the UK, it is fast
closing in on Woolworths' current number-one position.
Inspired
by Kid Rock's success, Warners decided to carry out a little experiment
and picked out the British R&B singer, Estelle, to act as their
guinea pig.
Estelle released her Shine album
earlier this year. It boasted one huge hit single in American Boy.
Looking at Estelle's iTunes sales figures, Warners found that almost
everyone was downloading the American Boy song and not bothering with
anything else on the album. dlgoogle125.xml
Warners
pulled the Shine album off iTunes in the US, which meant that all those
people who still wanted to buy American Boy were forced to buy the full
album.
The predictable happened: Estelle's US
sales figures plummeted, and hilariously (if you weren't Estelle or
Warners) a limp cover version of American Boy by an act called Studio
All-Stars soared up the iTunes download charts in Estelle's absence.
A few weeks ago, Warners rather meekly put Shine back up on the US iTunes store.
Shine
was never a strong enough album with which to test how firm the
stranglehold iTunes has over the music market. On Oct 20, though, this
year's biggest-selling album, in all probability, will be released and
it, too, won't be available on iTunes.
If
AC/DC's Black Ice performs, it could have serious long-term
consequences for the pre-eminent position of iTunes as a music
retailer.
If the album is the year's biggest
seller - and with U2 not releasing No Line On The Horizon until
January, there's only Coldplay's Viva La Vida in the way - then many
acts already harbouring grievances against iTunes might well be
persuaded to join AC/DC on the other side of the digital divide.
The
Australian no-nonsense rockers refuse to allow their work to be sold on
iTunes because they argue that their albums are complete pieces of work
that represent them at a certain time and place in their musical career
and are not just a bunch of individual downloads to be cherry-picked by
fans.
Because iTunes steadfastly refuses to "lock"
any album (the vast majority of songs on the site can be downloaded as
individual tracks), AC/DC don't just boycott the online store, but are
now active anti-iTunes evangelists.
"We don't make
singles, we make albums," says guitarist Angus Young. "Way back in the
Seventies, we drew these figures on the back of an envelope for our
record company.
"We showed them how much they
earned from us if we sold one million singles and how much they earned
if we sold one million albums. The difference was staggering.
"That
was to get them off our back because we only very grudgingly release
singles. Our real reason is that we honestly believe the songs on any
of our albums belong together.
"If we were on
iTunes, we know a certain percentage of people would only download two
or three songs from the album - and we don't think that represents us
musically."
Young happily points out that
projected sales figures show that AC/DC's 1980 Back in Black album will
soon leapfrog Michael Jackson's Thriller album to become the
biggest-selling album ever - and it won't be available on iTunes.
Though
the Beatles' back catalogue is still not available on iTunes, this will
be the first time in the music store's short history that it will be
deprived of a major current release.
For good or ill, iTunes has changed how we consume music.
Though
it rightly boasts that it helped the music industry recover ground from
the damage done by the illegal downloading pandemic, iTunes makes it
easier for us to pay only for the hit singles, not the 10 other
"filler" tracks on an album.
Katy Perry has sold
2.2 million downloads of I Kissed a Girl on iTunes, but only 282,000
copies of her album. That sort of singles-to-album sales ratio simply
never happened pre-iTunes.
Guy Garvey, the lead
singer of this year's Mercury Music prize winners, Elbow, says: "iTunes
is responsible for the death of the album."
As
with AC/DC, he calls for the site to offer artists the choice of
"locking" their album. "The album is a piece of work that we laboured
over and not a bunch of downloads flung together to satisfy a
contractual demand."
There are also financial
reasons for opposing iTunes. With no packaging or distribution costs,
royalty rates should be higher, says Kid Rock. This is the reason he
won't allow his work on iTunes.
Angus Young says
that two big name rock acts are now rethinking their presence on iTunes
because the singles vs albums sales equation simply isn't working for
them.
"I met these bands and they were asking me
all about not being on iTunes," he says. "I told them that since iTunes
came into existence, we've actually increased our back catalogue sales
without being on the site, and at the time we were sternly warned by
our management team and our record label that the complete opposite
would be the case."
Young wouldn't confirm the
names of those acts. But recently, the Wall Street Journal published
sales figures that showed, of the six biggest back catalogue selling
acts in the world, the Rolling Stones, despite being available on
iTunes, limped into sixth place, with the top two acts on the list (the
Beatles and AC/DC) being iTunes refuseniks.
The
release of Black Ice will be a major blow for iTunes' claim to be the
world's biggest music retailer, but three days before that October 20
release date, a more significant threat to the company takes place when
the mobile phone company Nokia begin to sell their new "Comes With
Music" phone in UK stores.
The much-hyped Apple
iPhone was supposed to shore up iTunes sales (which it did) but Nokia
are making a bold raid on Apple's music download market.
The "Comes With Music" phone will allow users to download all the music they want for a fixed monthly subscription fee (the price of which is yet to be revealed by the company).
Each
of the four major music labels have already agreed to make their entire
catalogues available for the "Comes With Music" phone.
The phone requires an initial 12-month contract, but this does not need to be renewed.
In
the future we will all receive our music under a subscription model.
Apple have advanced plans to release an "iTunes Unlimited",
all-you-can-eat subscription service, but Nokia have stolen a march on
the normally latest-greatest-most-up-to-datest company.
For Apple, "when troubles come, they come not in single spies" but as a Nokia music phone blasting out Whole Lotta Rosie.
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