“

All told, the sales picture in the report is bleak: “The 20/20 Experience” was the only album to sell more than 2 million copies last year, and it is only the second album since 1991 to top the year-end chart with fewer than 3 million sales. The previous low-selling No. 1, and the other to reach the top rung after selling fewer than 3 million,  was Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” (Cash Money/Universal Motown), which sold 2.87 million in 2008.

Moreover, album sales overall dropped 8 percent in 2013, to 289.4 million from almost 316 million in 2012. Sales of CDs dropped 14 percent over the year, and even digital download sales dropped slightly, to 117.58 million from 117.68 million. The drop in downloads was the first since Nielsen began tracking them in 2003. About 41 percent of all album sales were downloads, up from 37 percent in 2012. And vinyl remains a growth industry: Nielsen SoundScan reported 6.1 million sales of vinyl LPs, up 33 percent since 2012.

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– http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/justin-timberlake-album-was-the-top-seller-in-a-diminished-market/?ref=todayspaper

“

A flourishing teen-pop industry thinks it knows what teenagers care about: crushes, breakups, clothes, parties, perhaps an occasional glimmer of rebellion or idealism. It dispenses songs that are calculated to suit that market. But in 2013, a songwriter who is an actual teenager emerged from the far side of the planet with something smarter and deeper: a class-conscious critique of pop-culture materialism that’s so irresistible it became a No. 1 pop single.

That teenager, now 17, is Ella Yelich-O’Connor, from the suburbs of Auckland, New Zealand, who records as Lorde. In her hit “Royals,” she sings about middle-class kids bombarded by music-video fantasies of bling and luxury but responding, “That kind of luxe just ain’t for us.” It’s palatial-sounding pop that doesn’t condescend to listeners of any age. The song and her debut album brought Lorde four Grammy nominations — including song of the year — although she was inexplicably denied a fifth, for best new artist.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/arts/music/lordes-royals-is-class-conscious.html?ref=todayspaper

“

Nirvana will be inducted, as was widely expected. But so will Kiss, the costumed and made-up stars of hard rock that been snubbed by the Hall of Fame for years.

The other stars being inducted in the 29th annual ceremony, to be held at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on April 10, are Hall and Oates, Linda Ronstadt, Cat Stevens and Peter Gabriel, who is being recognized as a solo performer but has already been inducted as part of the band Genesis.

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– http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/nirvana-to-join-rock-hall-of-fame-alongside-kiss-at-barclays-center/?ref=todayspaper

“

The record, “Beyoncé” (Columbia), appeared on Apple’s iTunes store at midnight on Thursday with no warning. Yet Apple reported on Monday that it became the fastest-selling album in its history, with 828,773 around the world in its first three days, including 617,213 in the United States. It reached No. 1 on iTunes’s sales rankings in 104 countries.

In the United States, where albums are typically released on Tuesdays, “Beyoncé” had the fourth-biggest opening-week sales of any album this year, after Justin Timberlake’s “The 20/20 Experience” (with 968,000 sales), Eminem’s “The Marshall Mathers LP 2” (792,000) and Drake’s “Nothing Was the Same” (658,000). It also performed far better than Beyoncé’s last album, “4,” which sold 310,000 copies in its first week two years ago.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/business/media/apple-says-beyonce-set-a-record-on-itunes.html?ref=todayspaper

Blood Orange – Time Will Tell

Keeping up with the endless spawning of new sub-and sub-sub-genres of music can be hard. Just when you catch up with seapunk and witch house, they’re not cool anymore. Everyone’s already moved on to Nintendocore.

To help you brush up on how rock music evolved into the many-tentacled beast that it is today, designer Brittany Klontz created an interactive infographic for ConcertHotels.com that maps 100 years of genres in less than a minute. It not only provides the names and birth dates of each style, but also offers sample songs allowing you to finally know what skiffle sounds like.

“

Most people credit Sly Stone’s use of a Maestro Rhythm-King MRK-2 on the 1971 No. 1 “Family Affair” as one of the defining early moments for programmed percussion. During the ‘70s, the devices worked their way into hits—Blondie’s “Heart Of Glass,” Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” Roxy Music’s “Dance Away”—and carved space in both explicitly regenerative genres like new wave and commercial juggernauts like disco. In the ‘80s, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Madonna all used drum machines. Hip-hop developed into a national force behind acts like Run DMC, LL Cool J, and the Beastie Boys; they had the toughest beats around, put together with drum machines.

There are still corners of the world for the machines to colonize—they probably appear less in country music, for example, though J.J. Cale used them under his loping country grooves—but their unique propulsion is pervasive, and valuable. This is true regardless of how you evaluate music. If your metric is sonic innovation, drum machines have consistently pushed boundaries further: Kraftwerk playing every part of their songs on a machine; Lee “Scratch” Perry using the “Super Rhythmer” to help open reggae’s spaces; Prince working with Linn models, pumping record levels of sexuality and whiplash into funk and pop.

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– http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/the-immortal-soul-of-the-drum-machine/280947/