Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment by Anita Elberse

Author:Anita Elberse [Elberse, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805094336
Amazon: 1491518642
Goodreads: 17286696
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2013-10-15T06:00:00+00:00

Recorded Music Sales in 2011: Digital Tracks

In the recorded-music industry in 2011, more than 8 million unique digital-track titles together sold 1.271 billion copies. The figure shows how sales were distributed across groups of titles with different levels of popularity. For instance, nearly 6 million titles—74 percent of all unique titles—each sold fewer than 10 copies, accounting for only 1 percent of sales.

The same patterns are visible in album sales. As the next chart shows, out of a total of 880,000 albums that sold at least one copy in 2011, 13 album titles sold more than a million copies each, together accounting for 23 million copies sold. That’s 0.001 percent of all titles accounting for 7 percent of sales. The top 1,000 albums generated about half of all the sales, and the top 10,000 albums around 80 percent of sales. Deep in the tail, 513,000 titles, or nearly 60 percent of the assortment, sold fewer than 10 copies each, together making up half a percent of total sales.

The numbers certainly do not come close to the trusted “80/20 rule” that many managers live by, which supposes that 80 percent of the sales tend to come from 20 percent of the products on offer. For music albums, it is closer to an 80/1 rule—if we can speak about a rule at all. Even if we take a conservative estimate of what would be on offer in a bricks-and-mortar store at any given point in time, Anderson’s predictions that long-tail sales will rival those in the head are far off.

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