USB Flash Drives: The New Way to Sell Music?

As I mentioned in my previous post, record sales have plummeted within the last few years. Recently, I discovered that record labels are trying out a new way to sell music: USB flash drives.

In May, Universal Music Group released a limited edition Lady Gaga USB flash drive. The USB contains the songs from Lady Gaga’s album, The Fame Monster, along with remixes, music videos, and a few digital extras such as a digital booklet, photo gallery, and links to websites. The USB sold out within 24 hours of its release.

Lady Gaga Limited Edition USB

It would be interesting to see how many units would sell if these USBs weren’t limited editions. What would sales look like if USBs replaced CDs on store shelves? Would people be more willing to buy music in this form because it’s something different and tangible?

The advantages to music on USB are that it’s something new and different, and USBs can hold a lot more than a traditional CD. However, the disadvantage is that USB sticks can’t be played in conventional form. The music first has to be uploaded to a computer and then played either directly from the computer or from an iPod or similar device.

It will be interesting to see what direction record labels take with USBs.

State of the Industry—State of Emergency

I remember back in the early 2000s, it was very common for recording artists to sell over a million records within the first week of their album’s release. For example, In 2000, *Nsync’s No Strings Attached album sold a record-breaking 2.4 million copies in its first week. Later that year, The Beatles’s 1 (a compilation of The Beatles’s greatest hits) broke that record, selling 3.6 million copies in its first week. A few years later, record sales were still up, with albums like Eminem’s The Eminem Show, selling 1.32 million copies in its first week in 2002 and 50 Cent’s The Massacre selling 1.14 million copies in its first week in 2005.

Even if an album didn’t sell a million copies in its first week, it would usually accomplish that within a few weeks or months. For example, in 2002, Britney Spears’s self-titled album sold 768,500 units in its first week, but within a month, she had already sold over 2 million. This was the norm—selling over a million records within the first week or so. Now these numbers are unheard of.

Today, going Gold (selling 500,000 copies) within the first week is considered a big deal. Drake’s Thank Me Later, one of the most anticipated albums of this year, was expected to sell a little less than 500,000 copies its first week. Eminem, whose comeback album, Recovery, was also highly anticipated, was not expected to do much better. After the Nielsen SoundScan numbers came in, we saw that the predictions were correct; Drake sold 462,989 albums in the first week and Eminem sold 753,870.

These numbers are nothing compared to what sales used to be in the early 2000s when the music industry was at its peak. Since then, record sales have plummeted. With albums being leaked left and right on the Internet, it is difficult to imagine sales up to those numbers again. (Yes, illegal downloading took away A LOT of potential album sales for Drake, with over 5 million copies of Thank Me Later being downloaded illegally online). The music industry has clearly come under a state of emergency.