SoundScan’s Third-Quarter Numbers in One Word: Bleak
No Album Has Gone Platinum In 2014.
Bad news keeps mounting with the roll of the tape.
So far this year, 60 digital songs have sold over 1 million units as compared to 83 last year. And after nine months, not one artist-album has yet to hit the million-unit mark, although the Frozen soundtrack is the year’s best-seller so far with a robust 3.12 million units.
In the prior year, five albums each had scanned over a million units, led by Justin Timberlake‘s 20/20 Experience, which at the end of 2013’s third quarter had scans of 2.3 million units.
The best-selling artist title this year is Beyonce’s self titled album with 776,000 scans, followed by Lorde‘s Pure Heroine, with 754,000 units. But like Frozen, both of those albums came out last year, which means that so far the top three selling albums this year were released last year. The top-selling release from this year is the No. 4 title, Eric Church‘s Outsiders with 722,000 scans, just ahead of Coldplay‘s Ghost Stories, by a a few units.
Getting back to digital songs, Pharrell Wiliams‘ “Happy,” is the best-selling track this year with 6.2 million scans followed by John Legend‘s “All of Me,” with 4.4 million scans and Katy Perry‘s “Dark Horse,” featuring Juicy J, with 4.3 million scans.
As usual, the Universal Music Group dominates market share, with 38.3 percent of album and track sales (album plus track equivalent albums), exactly the same amount it had last year at the end of the third quarter. Sony Music Entertainment meanwhile, fell to 27.7 percent from 29.1 percent, while the Warner Music Group slipped a little bit to 19.4 percent from 19.7 percent. The indie sector — in this case defined as those labels not distributed by major-owned indies — enjoyed a market share increase to 13.7 percent from 12.3 percent, while nearly 1 percent in market share is under review until the titles can be correctly identified with their distributors.
While indie market share is only at 12.3 percent in this view, if indie market share is calculated by ownership, the sector collectively has about 35 percent market share, when labels like Razor & Tie and Curb — distributed by the majors — and labels like Epitaph and Broken Bow — distributed by major-owned indies like RED, Alternative Distribution Alliance and Caroline — are included in indie share. (Since Nielsen SoundScan doesn’t break out market share by label ownership, Billboard calculates this metric twice a year, at mid-year and year-end.)
