On The Road to Summer 2011

Cross your fingers that the long list of 2011's tours will fare far better than 2010's did.  This year is looking to have a pretty strong hold in arena venues.  Case in point: Taylor Swift sold out 2 shows at New Jersey's Prudential Center within minutes and added 2 more at the same 18,000 seater (which is superb, especially in the current state of the industry).  Although, the 21 year old has been slingshotting up every scale possible since she hit the scene.  Anyhow, with help from Rolling Stone, here's looking back at a pout-filled 2010's touring and sales industries and a surprising sunny side.

Although the previous decade was a mudslide for the music industry - album sales continued their downfall, down 13%, digital music nearly halted, and the concert business took a nosedive - Peter Katsis, manager of Korn and Jane's Addiction makes a good point.  "Everybody's working with less money.  But it's really forcing people to get more creative.  It's kept us all on our toes."  Artists such as Bon Jovi, Roger Waters, DMB, and several others (see following post) had very solid tour runs.  Revenues for the top 100 tours dropped 13% and ticket sales fell 12%, following a successful 15-year boom (Pollstar).  Canceled tours included Christina Aguilera (just after going on sale), Limp Bizkit (before tour even started), Lilith Fair, Rihanna, Jonas Brothers, American Idols Live!, and so many more were forced by promoters to cancel or move to much smaller venues.  After the largest promoter in the world, Live Nation, merged with Ticketmaster in a $2.5B deal, LN did something unheard of, cutting ticket prices to $10 just to get folks in the door.  In 2010 summer, Chief Executive of promoter AEG Live, Randy Phillips, stated "we haven't had this many former headliners having to struggle like this to sell tickets".

Digital sales have been a tremendous success and a bright spot for the record industry...until 2010.  Nielson SoundScan reports just a 1% increase, possibly due to the controversial deal between iTunes and record labels, which raised Hot Track prices from $0.99 to $1.29 in April.  Jack Isquith, formerly with Warner believes this has to do with a maturing format.  "It's no longer new and shiny".

For music buyers, a warm spot was in Amazon's fight for a downloads upper-hand with iTunes.  Consequently, Amazon slashed prices on albums including Vampire Weekend's Contra, Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, Kid Rock's Born Free, and the Rolling Stones' Excile on Main Street to $3.99, meaning the company took a $3-$4 loss on each just to get buyers buying.  Vampire Weekend sold 124k copies in its first week and hit #1.  Kid Rock, who, by choice, isn't available on iTunes, sold 12% of his 189k first-week copies as Amazon MP3s.  Arcade Fire, this 2011's surprise Album of the Year Grammy winner, went to the top spot in its first week with 156k sales.

Eminem proved hip-hop is ready to come back with a vengeance, after its 20-30% sales drop over the past five years.  Mather's comeback album, Recovery, sold 3.4M and was accompanied by solid hits from Kanye, Drake, Nicki Minaj, and Lil Wayne.  Hip-hop rose 3%, while its genre counterparts dropped by double-digit figures, except for country, which dropped 5% (thanks Taylor & Lady Antebellum for your combined 6M copies of your latest albums!).

Vinyl, which has been making a very slow and questionable comeback was 2010's fastest-growing format.  It sold 2.8M units, more copies than any other year since SoundScan started tracking sales in 1991.  Fans were ringing up purchases such as Arcade Fire, the Black Keys, reissues such as the Beatles' Abbey Road and John Coltrane's Blue Train.  Says Marc Weinstein, co-founder of California's Amoeba Music chain, "LP sales are going up, up, up."  Seems he may be onto something, after selling an average of 400 LPs a day in his San Fran store alone.