How the Music Industry Is Becoming More Like the Movie Industry

Every Monday it’s the same thing:  which movies did best at the box office over the weekend?  The grosses don’t tell us how good the movies are; it’s only how much people decided to spend on seeing them.

But the movie industry lives and dies by opening weekend box office numbers. If a movie stiffs, there’s no point shovelling more money into marketing.  Sure, we sometimes see some out-of-left-field indie movie that slowly gains traction, but those are increasingly rare.

The music business is becoming increasingly fixated to first week sales.  It used to be that albums could be nurtured up the charts over a period of weeks or even months.  There was time and money to do that.  But now if an album doesn’t chart high enough or sell sufficient units in that first week, then the record is considered a failure.  Best cut the losses and move on.

Music Industry Blog looks deeper at this disturbing (well, to me) phenomenon. Read all about it here.