Posted on: Sunday, July 7, 2002

2002 shaping up as another lousy year for record sales

By Edna Gundersen
USA Today

In record sales, last year's down is starting to look up.

Mid-year totals point to a far sharper decline than the 3 percent dip in 2001, the first no-growth year since Nielsen SoundScan began tabulating sales in 1991.

As of June 23, retailers had sold 299.2 million albums, compared with 331.4 million during the same period in 2001, a 9.7 percent drop. The total for albums and singles: 305.7 million, a 12 percent drop. The picture darkens against figures from 2000. This year's haul trails by 18 percent against the 372.6 million copies tallied by June 25, 2000.

"What we saw at the end of 2001 isn't as alarming as what we're seeing now," says Geoff Mayfield, Billboard's director of charts. "Last year's decline had more to do with the cassette dying out than anything else. Except for Easter, there hasn't been a week where business was up over the same week in 2001, and that's far more disturbing than the decline of one configuration."

Despite predictable sales spikes, starting with this week's expected opening figure of 500,000-plus for rapper Nelly's "Nellyville," a recovery by year's end, even to a break-even point with 2001, "is a long shot," Mayfield says. "The easiest thing to blame is CD burning, but we may be fighting more than one demon."

Mayfield compares the current nose-dive to the early '80s, when a dreary economy, rapid extinction of the eight-track and a dearth of fresh sounds contributed to a pop music crisis.

Evidence that the lack of compelling music is a culprit today can be found in the proliferation of oldies on non-oldies radio stations. "I'm getting the sense that programmers think the old stuff is better than the new stuff," says Airplay Monitor editor Sean Ross. "During the top-40 doldrums of '92, you had records by Nirvana, Snoop Dogg and others selling without air play. There was a feeling that something was going on. There's not that feeling this year."