On the heels of the will they or won’t they news stories of Van Halen, it seems nobody, outside of Taylor Swift, needs to ever record an album again, like ever, like never ever. Seriously, this is the week that the entire model of recording will change. Yes, that’s a bold statement, but the news on album sales is extreme. In October, news from major players, prompted by Forbes, called 2014 the low-point in music sales, reporting that thus far in 2014 no one artist’s album had gone platinum (not counting the soundtrack to the movie Frozen). Platinum sales, long-held to be the hallmark of success, is the sale of one million units in the US, and this was to be the first year without a platinum seller since the Recording Industry Association of America started certifying such sales. Most music news services predicted the anticipated release date of October 26, for Taylor Swift’s album 1989, would change that.
In the meantime, articles ran about album sales not mattering. I saw Rob Zobbie say to Blabbermouth that he feels “freed” that albums don’t sell anymore so that he can make music he likes without the pressure of sales. I saw others talk about the importance of Spotify (the Swedish-based music streaming service that launched in the US in 2011). Spotify has pretty much the entire music catalog of every artist and reaches some 40 million users, a quarter of which get premium access for a fee of approximately $10 a month. Many music writers say that’s the wave of the future, that cds are dead, heck auto makers aren’t putting cd players in new-model cars anymore, that downloads are dead because they are a hassle, that we’ll be streaming all of our music, with the artists’ revenue going increasingly more towards the stream split and away from cd revenue. Many devices sold are for streaming. Even the venerable Marshall (maker of the most awesomest amps ever) is making a speaker device so your streams will be … loud. Streams will allow artists, new and revered, to be heard, and will allow Rob Zombie to record what he wants. Streams are where it’s going. We won’t need platinum sales. Right? Maybe, but that platinum benchmark remains. And it’s what the industry calls success. So … 2014, the first year without a platinum seller? Wrong. We have one….Taylor Swift’s, 1989.
Blowing predicted first-week estimates that ranged anywhere from 400,000 units to one million units, Swift’s actual first-week sales were a whopping 1.287 million units. Daily this past week, CNN ran a story about her, about her album sales, about her success, about … how she was going to run the free world. This day’s daily Taylor Swift news is reporting something even more shocking – that she has pulled her entire catalog from Spotify over money issues, no doubt demanding a larger share of the distributions, with some new articles going so far as to wonder what the impact of that will be on streaming. Perhaps, as they imply, that impact will be the stratification of music, with artists who have a big enough name, a big enough investment in hype selling the very occasional platinum release and every other release going straight to Spotify. But who will get those occasional platinum sales? What is it about Taylor Swift that sends her to the stratosphere; what gives her the one and only platinum-seller of 2014 and the power to leave Spotify; what allows her quite literally to take over the free world, or at least the free music world, and prompt a million people to actually pay for her music? I know the answer people! It’s cookies! Taylor Swift bribes her fans with cookies!
Seriously, in advance of the release of 1989, in addition to press hype (that was everywhere), Swift reached out to her fans (from her website, yet another example of a huge artist keeping fans in the loop), held contests – the typical meet and greet contests, but with a twist. In this contest, the meet and greet was at Taylor’s house (or residences of her family) where she assembled fans to hear the album before release and personally baked and handed out cookies. Cookies! Who doesn’t love cookies? So cookies are what’s needed to send an artist to the rarefied standing of platinum, to give an artist the power to yank the entirety of their catalog off Spotify, while all the rest are making excuses about how sales don’t matter because that makes them free to do music that only they will hear. Cookies: they’re very powerful. Turns out, they (or the personal attention to fans they bring) have the power to make an artist a platinum-seller. Turns out, in a world without yearly tours, without fan magazines, without any other means that makes artists seem accessible, cookies could save the music industry.
Taylor Swift at home with fans.