1. Peter Frampton’s "I’m In You" sold the first week too.<\/p>\n
2. 623,000 is less than Jay-Z’s 680,000 debut last December.\u00c2\u00a0 That was the fourth quarter.\u00c2\u00a0 As of last week, Jay-Z’s album "Kingdom Come" had sold 1,429,088.<\/p>\n
3. Norah Jones’ "Not Too Late" has sold 1,309,658 copies as of last week.\u00c2\u00a0 At a rate of 20,000 per week, is it ever going to hit 2 million?<\/p>\n
4. Linkin Park made its mark via rap rock.\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn’t a breakthrough as much as a refinement of the Limp Bizkit sound that preceded them.\u00c2\u00a0 They’ve abandoned this sound like a chump stops wearing a leisure suit.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, it’s worse, they’ve abandoned who they are.\u00c2\u00a0 God, if they were the apotheosis, the pinnacle of rap rock, maybe they could still make it with that sound.\u00c2\u00a0 But switching identities?\u00c2\u00a0 The reviews have been bad, both the legitimate ones in print and the buzz online.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s hard to get the stink off an album.\u00c2\u00a0 How do you get the stink off an album?\u00c2\u00a0 Via massive TV exposure and radio airplay.\u00c2\u00a0 But this isn’t that kind of act, this is not Gwen Stefani in outfits, the main audience doesn’t listen to Top Forty, it’s not enamored of terrestrial radio at all…\u00c2\u00a0 It’s going to be hard to get airplay, and hard to get the target market to pay attention.<\/p>\n
5. It’s been over four years since their last studio LP, "Meteora", and that’s just TOO LONG!\u00c2\u00a0 You were a teenager in high school, now you’re MARRIED!\u00c2\u00a0 This is not the eighties anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 God, it was bad enough in the seventies, when two years between records became de rigueur…\u00c2\u00a0 But that was before everybody had cable TV, video games, the Internet…\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to stay in the public eye, you’ve got to have a presence, or people move on.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh yeah, they did that "Collision Course" collaboration album with Jay-Z, but that was in 2004!\u00c2\u00a0 And funny how that was rap, and the new album is…<\/p>\n
6. Some bands have reputations as limit testers.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re trying something new, expanding the boundaries.\u00c2\u00a0 That is not Linkin Park.\u00c2\u00a0 Linkin Park is safe, mainstream, a distillation of what came before.\u00c2\u00a0 If they’d switched directions and blown our minds with something new, we might care.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s not like one listens to "Minutes To Midnight" and says HOW DID THEY COME UP WITH THIS?\u00c2\u00a0 Band longevity is more than a couple of monstrous albums, it’s got to do with cred, it’s got to do with leading your audience as opposed to following it, like NIN.\u00c2\u00a0 Linkin Park is no NIN.<\/p>\n
7. NIN’s album "Year Zero" is no barn burner, it’s only sold 306,761 to date.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe bad for Interscope, but not so bad for Trent Reznor.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s got a hard core fan base, his ticket sales are gargantuan, at high prices.\u00c2\u00a0 Who are you working for, the label or yourself?\u00c2\u00a0 Linkin Park might have sold many more records than Reznor, but he’s the one with the dyed-in-the-wool fans, he’s the one who can work for the next decade.<\/p>\n
8. Sales drops this year have been precipitous.\u00c2\u00a0 How many fans, touched by the hype, didn’t get to the store this week to buy "Minutes to Midnight".\u00c2\u00a0 Not many.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s going to drive big sales in the future?<\/p>\n
9. Rick Rubin is not infallible.<\/p>\n
10. What sold "Minutes To Midnight"?\u00c2\u00a0 Pent-up demand, brand name?\u00c2\u00a0 The question is will it KEEP selling.\u00c2\u00a0 Warner needs it to keep selling to make its numbers.\u00c2\u00a0 But NOTHING seems to keep selling today.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, you’re better off with Buble and country, but the way we’re going PLATINUM is going to be a thing of the past.<\/p>\n
11. If you’re trumpeting Linkin Park’s debut as evidence that the business is returning to health, you’re sorely mistaken.\u00c2\u00a0 Sales are cratering.\u00c2\u00a0 People want music, but the nineties paradigm of hyping to high hell and getting everybody whipped up into some kind of frenzy are gone.\u00c2\u00a0 You just can’t get enough mindshare, you just can’t get enough people to pay attention.\u00c2\u00a0 In other words, it doesn’t matter WHAT Linkin Park’s new album sounds like, it’s just not going to be a sales monster.<\/p>\n
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1. Peter Frampton’s "I’m In You" sold the first week too. 2. 623,000 is less than Jay-Z’s 680,000 debut last December.\u00c2\u00a0 That was the fourth quarter.\u00c2\u00a0 As of last week, Jay-Z’s album "Kingdom Come" had sold 1,429,088. 3. Norah Jones’ "Not Too Late" has sold 1,309,658 copies as of last week.\u00c2\u00a0 At a rate of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-cY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}