10.25.12 TRES #1 Dance Single, PLL bump goes on!

Miles Tougeaux ‏@milestougeaux
.@nbcsnl Adam Lambert #SNLHost #SNLMusic.

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Thank you for posting, stardust! I love the reference to the Adamtopia fan club!

Here's an interesting article that came out about a year ago in the UK. It is about bands that have a hit, then see sales drop off, sometimes dramatically. The music buying public is fickle. Also, sometimes fans can't keep up with musical changes that bands make. Sophomore albums often do not do well. It also touches on the importance of radio.

Do not read if hearing about a band's success unraveling will make you angst about Adam! I'm posting it because I find it interesting - I have a son in the music biz who has weathered some ups and downs -but I do not think this will happen to Adam. He works hard to stay in the public eye.

Here's the link:
www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/oct/27/when-bands-fall-off-cliffs

Here's a chunk for those who do not wish to read the the whole article. Caution, it does contain a few potentially angst-inducing remarks about the importance of radio play:

"A flop can be a rite of passage," says Tony Wadsworth, who was chairman and CEO of EMI Music from 1998 to 2008. "The curse of album two nearly finished Blur, but it ended up putting lead in their pencil. Modern Life Is Rubbish marked a huge drop in sales. They had invented this new world, and it took until Parklife for people to understand what they were doing. Sometimes you can edge too far ahead of your audience, and then you have to hope you don't lose them."

But what if you do lose 90% of them? "Then you assess what it is you're doing," Wadsworth says. "You regroup and start hustling again, but it's crucial that you believe in your own creative processes. Don't put all your best songs on the first album; Dylan and the Beatles always held stuff back. ...

"Radio is still it," agrees Feargal Sharkey, the former Undertones singer who now heads UK Music, an umbrella organisation representing the UK's commercial music industry. ...

Singer-songwriter David Gray was the opposite of the next big thing when he released his White Ladder album in 2000. Gray's fourth record was expected to sell in similarly modest proportions to the previous three. But a groundswell started by the second single, Babylon, eventually drove sales over the 7m mark.

"What helped me is that I'd been making music for a while when the success came," he says over the phone from Italy, where he is on holiday with his family. "I could handle it better. But the period after the success is always very difficult. If Radio 1 or Radio 2 don't playlist your record, it has a profound impact on your sales. When the BBC decided to play Babylon, all hell broke loose, but if you don't keep that up then you end up back in the Borderline – and when you've got used to the Hammersmith Apollo, that can be very depressing."

peace&love