THE TOP OF the Irish and UK album charts in January 2011 saw Bruno Mars and Adele battling it out for the top position. Hello! The top of the Irish and UK album charts in January 2012 sees Bruno Mars and Adele battling it out for the top position.
That both Doo-Wopsand Hooligansand 21still have a stranglehold over the top spots one year on tells you everything you need to know about the state of the music industry. This really isn't supposed to happen.
Granted, we are talking about two pieces of work that appeal to a broad record-buying demographic. but the Groundhog Chart this produces is quite remarkable.
There are reasons behind this impasse: you need relatively few albums to hit the top of the charts at this time of the year; a lot of the big guns who could potentially challenge both acts are waiting until February or March to release; and, perhaps most importantly, both albums are back where they were a year ago because a lot of people using the vouchers they got as Christmas presents are opting for tired and trusted works.
With so little movement in the album charts, it’s a good time to do some forensics on it. There are surprise re-entries and big movers, but closer inspection reveals that all of said acts just happened to have appeared on Jools Holland’s BBC Hootenanny programme – a pivotal piece of exposure that, depending on the quality of acts, ensures strong retail sales in the weeks after screening.
And with money talking this month, discounted albums are shooting up the charts. For example, The Vaccines' What Did You Expect from The Vaccines? was greatly reduced this month, and a heap of TV ads drew punters' attention to this. As a result, and against all sales forecasts, they've have been climbing back up the album charts. (You can buy the disc for just €4.99 on iTunes at the moment.)
It says a lot about where the market for indie guitar rock is now when you consider that ads for the cut-price Vaccines album all ran during the breaks between football matches in the UK.
It is odd to see an indie guitar album climbing the charts (no matter what the promotional discount push), as everything else in the current climate militates heavily against the genre. Only one debut album from a guitar band released in 2012 made it into the top 35 best sellers of the year (our friends The Vaccines). That is a new low.
And it reeks of desperation when the list of the top five best- selling “rock” albums of 2011 includes Florence and the Machine and Mumford and Sons (shurely shome mishtake?) alongside Coldplay, Noel Gallagher and Foo Fighters.
The bottom line here is that the labels are only pumping money into acts that will sell – and, by today’s reckoning, if you don’t sound vaguely like Bruno Mars or Adele and have that huge potential cross-over appeal, you’re finished before you’ve even started. And because there are cyclical patterns at work, it will be a good few years before indie landfill darkens the record shop door again.
As always, the rallying cry goes up that all it takes is for a new Nirvana, a new Strokes or a new Arctic Monkeys to spin the table around again. But the entire infrastructure of the record industry (not to mention its media) has changed dramatically. As have the musical inclinations of radio pluggers, the sales teams and the TV bookers. Most vitally of all, so have the tastes and interests of the buying public.
In 2012, pop outsold rock. And by a very wide margin.
Mixed bag
The Cure have reached for the eyeliner and hairspray and confirmed some festival dates. Throw them into the RDS, I say, and let's have a massive Goth-off.
A fan broke into Kate Bush's house in order to propose to her. Perhaps not the best way to go about it – though he did buy a £3,000 engagement ring.
