Music that improves with age

Dwindling sales have forced the music industry to rethink its marketing, with older audiences now the most lucrative sector, writes Stuart Nicholson.

It might sound a bit like Chaos Theory - you know the sort of thing, a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and causes a tornado in Texas - but try this. If it wasn't for music downloading from the Internet, then there wouldn't be quite so many jazz singers being pushed by the record companies these days. Surely you've noticed? All of a sudden we're up to here in jazz-influenced singers. In February, for example, Norah Jones, the 23-year-old daughter of Ravi Shankar, picked up a remarkable five Grammies, including Record of the Year, for her album Come Away With Me.

Three months ago, Jamie Cullum, probably destined be the biggest name since Sinatra did it his way, was signed by Verve records for a cool £1.3 million. Cullum, a Wiltshire-born 23-year-old with a magnetic stage presence and a way of singing jazzy standards that's all his own, won the Rising Star category at last month's BBC Jazz Awards. He's on the fast track to stardom, set to join a new generation of photogenic singers such as Diana Krall, Jane Monheit and Norah Jones.

Over the last year, record companies have been busy signing up new singing talent. Other young artists coming your way in the not-too-distant future include Peter Cincotti (pronounced sin-cotti) signed by Concord, Michael Buble (pronounced boo-blay) signed by Warner Bros., and cabaret-style singer Melissa Errico, who shares Norah Jones's producer Arif Mardin. But how come this new breed of smooth operators are suddenly elbowing their way into the spotlight?

The reason is that the music industry is in crisis, which, like all crises in the music industry, means that nobody knows where the market is going or what audiences want. But this crisis is like no other. The global downturn of CD sales during the 1990s has been exacerbated by the threat posed to the music industry by file sharing on the web. Increasingly, music files are being freely swapped by enthusiastic listeners through computer programs like Napster (the leader through the mid-1990s when the music business successfully killed it), Kazaa and Morpheus.

The music industry bitterly complains that this is causing them to lose sales, as companies like EMI, BMG and Universal spend millions to battle what they call "internet piracy". Today, Eminem's fans are more likely to consider his latest release something they can download from the Internet rather than an item you might buy in a record shop. Consequently, you can get into the top ten these days with sales of 15,000. We are in a world where polyphonic ring tones are set to outstrip sales of CD singles. When Universal released the Sugar Babes Round Round as a CD single they also put out a ring tone of the song. You've guessed. The ring tone got the best sales. The pop industry is looking down the abyss.

But older music fans don't think in terms of downloading or ring tones. Rule of thumb - adults don't download. Most haven't got the time and anyway, they were raised on buying albums and building a collection. According to the latest statistics, the fastest growing segment of the album buying public is the 45-year-old plus group - the baby boomers - that has doubled in the last decade. In contrast, the 15-24-year-old category now only accounts for 25 per cent of sales, down a third since 1992.

With older audiences now comprising 54.5 per cent of the market, the major record companies are hoping to woo what may be the only important market left to them. As David Foster, Michael Buble's producer, said: "This is the last vestige of the music-buying public. If the \ don't go after them, they'll have no business at all." This is not a simple shift in marketing strategy but a striking departure from their once inviolate rule of targeting younger audiences. According to Norah Jones's record label Blue Note, the buzz about her multiple Grammy winning album started with consumers in their forties and fifties, and took off from there.

In the past, this market sector was seldom exploited by record companies, since they were never really sure how to sell to the more independent minded older listeners. But the feeling was that if you could appeal to them you'd have a smash hit - in the 1980s Linda Ronstadt did just that with an album of standards arranged by Sinatra's long time arranger Nelson Riddle and in the 1990s Natalie Cole swept the Grammies and dominated the charts with a "duet" with her late father, Nat King Cole.

Back then younger audiences, more prone to buying in packs and easier to sell to, were the prime market and as long as that sector was buoyant, why waste time bothering with older audiences? Now, the market demographics have changed dramatically, so an investment of £1.3 million for jazz singer Jamie Cullum begins to make sense. Affable, unaffected, he has stage presence and, as they used to say in the old Hollywood movies: "He can sell a song."

Universal's bid beat out Sony and others, and later in the year Cullum will make his New York début in the Oak Room cabaret of the famous Algonquin Hotel.

The step from playing in local bars and jazz clubs to Universal's seven-figure advance took less than one year after the release of his début album on the Candid label, Pointless Nostalgic. Cullum had been signed by UK jazz-indie Candid on the recommendation of a fellow singer Clare Teal, who is one of the label's young vocal stars.

The other is Stacey Kent, winner of the Best Vocal category in the BBC Jazz Awards in 2001 and 2002. Her latest album, The Boy Next Door, is just out, and with Allen Sviridoff, who masterminded Rosemary Clooney's career, taking over as her manager, she seems another name destined for international stardom.

There's always an audience for good songs sung well, and the enduring quality of the classic American Songbook (Gershwin, Kern, Rogers & Hart, Porter and so on) has been tried and tested down the decades. Well crafted lyrics married to elegant melodies is something the pop world is pretty short of right now - that, and the kind of singers who can reveal the meaning of a song. The question is, will this new breed of songsters be enough to turn around declining CD sales? If the evidence so far is anything to go by, with Norah Jones racking up six million sales and Diana Krall two million with their current albums, then they stand a pretty good chance. And if they do, then quality songs may well make a comeback. But there is a downside. Just imagine your train journey being interrupted by a polyphonic ring tone for all 108 bars of Cole Porter's Begin the Beguine.