January 13th, 2010
Susan Boyle And The Internet
I got a call from one of my friend’s at Sony last week: “Your data for Susan Boyle is wrong. There is no way her numbers are that low.”
I could hardly believe it myself.
Her album, I Dreamed a Dream had come out at the end of November and was still the second best-selling album of 2009 behind Taylor Swift’s Fearless. In six weeks Susan Boyle has moved well-over 3 million units. I Dreamed a Dream topped the US-based charts and shifted 136,566 units for the week ending January 3rd yet in that same week she added little more than 4,000 Fans across all the networks in our system! Her daily play count on MySpace is typically in the hundreds! By contrast, the #2 selling artist of the week, Lady Gaga, is streamed hundreds of thousands of times a day on MySpace.
The major labels are amazing at the marketing, distribution and promotion of a story and artist like Susan Boyle. The people who watch Britain’s Got Talent and buy physical units are not the people that friend bands on Facebook or stream their music online. The shift in behavior is well underway.
We will NEVER see another new artist with such a lopsided physical/digital distribution. We live in transitory times.
This is a no-brainer and can be solved with one word. DEMOGRAPHICS! Older people watch TV and still buy cd's, identify with Susan Boyle and don't stream music on the internet! This is the reason this is happening. This is not a mystery!
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