Niklas' blog

Isn’t it strange to see the correlation between downloading music and record sales, countered with the number of gripes from the major record-selling industry?

Mind you, these are major label mega-gripes

Now, what’s happened in the past week, I hear you ask?

A 48-year-old Scottish church volunteer has trumped Arctic Monkeys and Leona Lewis – not to mention U2 and Michael Jackson – with record-breaking sales of her first LP. Susan Boyle’s I Dreamed a Dream topped the charts with the biggest first-week sales for a debut album in UK history.

I Dreamed a Dream, which is mostly a collection of covers, sold more than 410,000 copies in the UK, according to the Official Charts Company. This beats the two most recent record-holders for the fastest-selling debut album: Leona Lewis’s 2007 release, Spirit, which sold about 376,000 copies; and Arctic Monkeys’ 2006 record, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, which sold about 363,000.¹

Of course, nobody will care about Susan Boyle’s album in a few months’ time. Bless places like bleep.com, Domino Records and artists like Nine Inch Nails and others who let users download the music in a variety of ways and don’t send their lawyers down everybody’s pathway are more and more prone to actually doing what they should: sell music.

I think the majors are shooting themselves in the foot by going after the little people. Distancing yourselves from people shouldn’t be done that way, y’all!

1. From this article in The Guardian.[back]