" Billboard magazine has as a cover article in the February 24, 2001
edition:

"Soundtrack Sales Aren't 'Titanic'- Despite a Few Hits, Market for
Blockbuster Movie Music is Flattening".

This article covers most of the releases that will make many of you cringe. And worse yet, for the music industry, even those 'soundtracks' aren't selling - or are they? I bring this up because it is important to understand how the music industry looks at releasing Film Music. The song CD to Armageddon sold 3.9 million copies, City of Angels sold 5.1 million copies, Hope Floats sold 2.6 million copies and of course Titanic sold more than 9.9 million copies. The recent softening of the market means that 'soundtracks' like Charlie's Angels only sold a disappointing 1.3 million copies.

The music industry is thinking in these terms of units sold. Them market for Original Score releases is obviously nowhere near these numbers. If you ever need a reason why Soundtracks get the attention (or lack of it) look no further than sales figures. I can think of several specialty labels that would be ecstatic if each of their release sold only 1.3 million copies.

Best Quote from the article "You look at the Godzilla soundtrack, where you had all these great songs, but none of them were in the movie, and you had to wait until the closing credits before you got the theme song. I think that's another issue you have with several soundtracks- the music that's integral [ to the album ] is not interspersed in the movie."

Now you can never again feel alone when you complain about 'missing music'. "

Interesting, eh?

I think the "flattening sales" notion is nonetheless relative. I agree with the observation that song soundtracks aren't taking up 5 of the top 10 slots Billboard's Popular Top 100 Recordings anymore, but this does not mean song soundtrack sales are actually flattening. Song soundtracks made big waves in 1998-1999 because the marketing push was bigger, and more people were buying music (in other words, more units were selling) then than now (has to do with the economy, and some will have you believe, Napster). The joyful, short-lived Top 10 dominance that song soundtracks had was a spike in song soundtrack popularity which was the exception, not the rule, so it's not a good comparison to apply that specific, successful trend to now or even the past.

If we're gonna compare 1998 song soundtrack sales with 2001 sales, let's compare SCORE sales! Titanic sold close to 30 million copies worldwide in 1998. Has anything come close since? Not at all. Does this mean score soundtracks are flattening? Nope. The Titanic soundtrack was a TSUNAMI as it relates to average score soundtrack sales - it was super rare. Still, there are more people buying scores today than the historical average, for several reasons - one, there are TONS more scores out there to buy from, and two, as a result of the Titanic wave, even if half of one percent of those who bought the score became interested in more scores, that is growth for the score-buying population.

If there is a flattening anything, and there very well may be across all genres of music, it's because of a slowing economy, and yeah, people like to bag on Napster, so that, too. I don't necessarily agree with identifying Napster as an excuse for poor CD sales. Poor SINGLES sales, yes, but not album sales. If Napster is indeed the factual reason for slowing album sales, the number of units sold better go through the roof when Napster is finally closed. Somehow I doubt this will happen, though.

Of course, all this applies to official releases distributed through major channels. What Intrada, FSM, and now Rhino are doing with their handmade/hand-distributed product doesn't apply to Billboard charts at all, by the very nature of releasing limited editions. Trends at these private companies aren't going to reflect any apparent trends reported in magazines like Billboard.

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Originally posted by MWRuger:
This article covers most of the releases that will make many of you cringe. And worse yet, for the music industry, even those 'soundtracks' aren't selling - or are they? I bring this up because it is important to understand how the music industry looks at releasing Film Music. The song CD to Armageddon sold 3.9 million copies, City of Angels sold 5.1 million copies, Hope Floats sold 2.6 million copies and of course Titanic sold more than 9.9 million copies. The recent softening of the market means that 'soundtracks' like Charlie's Angels only sold a disappointing 1.3 million copies.

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It's a strange world. What more can one say?

http://www.medialinenews.com/issues/2001/news/0209/0209.3.shtml

One could argue that the demographic for the Beatles, with their 20 million units sold, is different than, say, Backstreet Boys or Limp Bizkit, but then again, these groups have certified U.S. sales of 8 million and 4 million units respectively for their latest albums. Save The Last Dance's soundtrack is certified at 2 million. Flat sales? For whom?

In addition, if sales ARE dropping, certainly the economy could be blamed for this (probably the most accurate) as well as this:

http://www.medialinenews.com/issues/2001/news/0209/0209.5.shtml

...the fact that people are spending money on OTHER entertainment. $4 billion in DVD (disc, not player) sales in the year 2000 is quite a huge chunk o'change (a 267% increase over the previous year) and, believe it or not, sell-through VHS video sales figures have INCREASED in dollars by 27% during the same period!

Most teens, and I work with kids, I know now make their own cds. If I ask them for a song, more often it coems from their own "mix" that they have put together either from friends cds, or Napster.
...

Another thing to realize is that "Titanic" managed to break across demographic lines and that meant people in their teens as well as folks in their "retirement" years likely ended up with a copy of this music (whether they liked anything other than "My Heart Will Go On".) Compare that to the success of say, "Somewhere in Time" or even "The Prince of Tides" and I think that it is obvious that when a film is able to involve multiple age groups in a consumer society, things connected to it will sell.
.....

Another problem is that most record labels no longer think (as if they ever did) beyond their bottom line. Marketing now directs decisions that used to be made by music departments. Those of you who are classical music "fans" will have noticed that the big labels are doing nothing more than reissuing back catalogue product (albeit in new ways).

There is a lot of esoteric music being recorded and many of those performances are very good. The problem is that most folks out there are not going to shell out $18 for a CD of unknown music that might be nothing more than dreck. Witness the success of Naxos which took its more esoteric stuff to its low price label (instead of Marco Polo which can run $20 in some cities). Naxos is doing amazing business and it manages to cover standard repertoire as well as explore new avenues.
.....

In my area, once really good music stores have been bought out, or put out of business, by big name companies (like Best Buy, Wherehouse Music,etc.) who came in and undercut prices. The fewer competitors there are, the higher the prices to the extent that it is now cheaper to get most anything I want via internet. Their shelf space is devoted to what they think will sell, so they will use three racks to display 100 copies of "City of Angels" while a copy of say "Unbreakable" is relegated to a single copy behind a pillar blocking access to direct visual contact with the product.

In the past, "cover" titles, like main themes and love songs got airplay--whether or not they were "rock" pieces or not. So, the bottom line is that things have not changed terribly much.

I don't really think that Titanic counts as a score album. (Okay, put down the axes and let me 'splain) In trying to decide why this album had such phenomenal sales one has to decide if it was James Horner's work that sold it or Celine Dion’s song or something else. Well, neither the Perfect Storm or Deep Impact were huge sellers so I don’t think that it was the score. I believe that it was a combination of Celine Dion’s singing and public fascination with the film and the Titanic in general that permeated the public consciousness. As PeterK pointed out, Titanic was an anomaly and probably not representative of soundtrack sales in general.

I would point out that this is not the first time we have faced just such a situation. Saturday Night Fever was a huge hit and was followed by a slew of releases trying to recreate the anomaly. You can reach even further back and examine the effect of The Graduate on sales and further on decisions about score or songtracks and the use of them in movies.

To me, the bottom line is how does the record industry view score releases? Do they lump us in with Songtrack sales or do they see us a discrete demographic that can be serviced at lower volume, higher cost release? Do they even have business models (ala FSM and Intrada) that will allow this to happen? Right now, I see Varese as the only big (relatively speaking) label that has a business model that actually works for score releases on a decent size scale. Further I would also postulate that they could make far more money if they produced more mainstream style albums (not that I think they will or should)

If they combine our sales with songtracks, and sales of these are perceived as disappointing than we will see fewer releases of scores as a natural consequence of lowered expectations for a particular market segment.

In case anyone forgets, when the score release for GHOST came out in 1990, which also included the Righteous Brothers' UNCHAINED MELODY (co-written by Alex North), the sales on this album went thru the roof. Was it because of Maurice Jarre's score? Very doubtful, regardless of what anyone thinks of the score. Most people came into the store (I was working in a retail music shop in a mall at the time) asking for "that song from Ghost," which just so happened at the time was ONLY available on the score CD, we couldn't keep enough copies of it in stock. The way the song was used within the movie was during a very emotional scene and it connected with people instantaneously...and this was a song that was recorded by the Righteous Brothers in the 60s! The timelessness of music!

Of course, Polygram and a few other companies scrambled to release a Greatest Hits compilation of The Righteous Brothers with Unchained Melody on it as fast as they could, but the soundtrack release of Ghost had already sold millions of copies, due mostly because this was the only way to purchase the SONG that people wanted. Once the Greatest Hits packages started showing up, these sold much better because they had other hit SONGS on them.

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Sakman has made some really great points. The only thing I'd like to comment on is when he mentioned that "the kids" these days are making their own compilations from Napster and their friends' CDs. I did this myself with tapes when I was a kid, borrowing friends' albums or CDs or recording songs off of the radio. Sure, nowaday it's digital, but how is it any different from what has come before? Do kids really care if the sound quality isn't perfect (lossy-based compresison of downloadable music), as the record industry seems to think we are all complaining about the sound quality of CDs that they must come out with new formats like SACD and DVD-Audio? All this so that they can continue to re-re-repackage the same material they've been releasing for the past 50 years? How much better is a 35 year old recording going to sound in DVD-Audio than on a regular CD? Audiophile quality is not what the masses are asking for. That's another niche market.

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Originally posted by PeterK:
The Titanic soundtrack was a TSUNAMI

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Hmmm... interesting.

I always thought it was a Sony...

"Reasons for this are endemic in American business where most [corporations] are more interested in the BIG score instead of cultivating and growing a market."

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Very true. I don't know how to say this without people thinking I am some pompous ass/retard or something (on the internet, it's so easy to go after misconceived ego), but the last 10 years of my work involved with film music has been dedicated to cultivating and growing this very market Michael Ruger is speaking about.

Corporations aren't interested in backing something that hasn't already proved itself. I can't think of a more perfect example than my work for Hollywood.com building the MovieTunes web site. If you aren't aware of MovieTunes, this was the first commercial website on the internet. In the summer of 1995, after unsuccessfully convincing composer agents their talent needed official websites (this was 1995, several years before the first official composer website would show up), I proposed the MovieTunes idea to Hollywood Online, a start-up internet company, soon to be owned by Times Mirror (former L.A. Times newspaper publisher before the Tribune bought them last year) at the time. Hollywood Online bit, and for several years, MovieTunes was one of the most popular areas of the Hollywood.com family of web sites, in terms of traffic. As the successes mounted (Yahoo! even named it Best Soundtrack Site at one point, and both BillBoard and Variety wrote stories about MovieTunes), I continued to propose ideas left and right about nurturing this market. The success of MovieTunes proved there was interest, all that was left was a solid commitment to "bring it to the next level," as CEOs like to say. What kind of ideas? With a major publisher as our owner, a glossy magazine could easily have worked (FSM ultimately would have been the acquisition target). Through Times Mirror's relationship with the movie industry and city of Los Angeles, we would sponsore Hollywood Bowl film music nights, etc. There was excitement in my head at the time, and I made sure to spend quality lunches and meetings with the execs. But, unfortunately, while the executive officers at Hollywood Online liked to talk about bringing it to the next level, MovieTunes and the score lovers' market wasn't on their priority list, as industry trends we're aimed at online theater listings and ticket sales. Exhausted and with regret, I left the company in April 1999 to start over with MovieMusic.com.

I realized it would be harder this time around to reach the goals of nurturing and developing our market, as the success wouldn't come as quickly due to no major affiliation with a high-traffic website and no major publishing parent. Our "industry" favorite, Ford Thaxton made matters worse by launching conspiracies about how I thwarted the MovieTunes web site and used Hollywood.com resources in my plans for MovieMusic.com. With that, I put some message board software up on MovieMusic.com, and I basically took a break for a year, followed some radio jobs, moved out of Los Angeles, and married my wife. Life was great!

The itch for nurturing the movie score market started bugging me again, so in August of last year, MovieMusic started rolling. Ford was banned, I met some of you when you came to San Diego (which was great), and the store opened. Slowly but surely, all of the things I've ever wanted to do to grow the number of soundtrack buyers will happen, but only if the store succeeds (which is where everyone here comes in!). The site is barely "finished" as I've read on some message boards and websites. On the contrary, it's only beginning. In a few days, we'll be shipping internationally, and in a month to two months (or so), we'll be selling more than 10,000 DVD titles. But that's not it! There's so much more.

I am only one person, I will admit. There's nothing thunderous happening, or with lightning speed. That kind of business happens in the corporate world, and, as MovieTunes neared that world very closely, it's just not the right fit for slowly growing the numbers of score buyers. In the corporate world, business doesn't move slow, as Michael said. For score fans, developing the markte needs to happen slowly if it's going to happen at all.

Varese Sarabande is the perfect example. It's taken them 20 years to get where they are.

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from PeterKExhausted and with regret, I left the company in April 1999 to start over with MovieMusic.com.

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This suggests to me that interest in film music is continuing to grow to a point where at a University with only about 250 ppl enrolled in the course they can run a class devoted sorely to film scores.

Newcastle University.

It may be more than 250 students, but it looked around that vacinity when we had a sign up day last week. (Though truth be known, I ALMOST failed Maths at High School...I don't care though. Maths schmaths.)

I'm pretty sure the film music course was introduced this year. Though it doesn't matter because I'm not allowed to do it until next 2nd year .
Still, say the course started last year it still continues to make me think that film scores are growing in popularity because a subject like this can be brought into a Music school with relatively few students.

Personally, I think its a much nicer environment with fewer students.

all other soundtrack labels will kneel in awe of the one that lands that contract (Sony Classical no doubt...)

On one hand, they do expose new fans to orchestral scores and that is a good thing but I think that it also raises expectations of performance that are seldom realized and that is not good.

If a label is expecting a Titanic and they get Hollow Man, saleswise, they may not take a chance on the next score release.

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Originally posted by JJH:
all other soundtrack labels will kneel in awe of the one that lands that contract (Sony Classical no doubt...)

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oh my.

guess I need to brush up on my Hairy Porter.

NP -- nothing. 'bout to go see The Mexican

If the labels want to expect James Horner's Titanic follow-up score to sell 10 million copies, they are fooling themselves and proving the music biz's self-righteous game plans for pop music do not carry over well when marketing scores, no matter what. If Sony Classical wants to shove 10 million copies of Deep Impact to the public, let them! It's too bad the label or biz has to come back and say that sales are flat because 10 million people didn't want the soundtrack. It reflects poorly on the 10 million score buyers Sony thought were out there (which they weren't - there aren't even 50,000 regular score buyers!). Unfortunately in this sense, the overexhuberence on the labels' part, as they set their sites high for future releases, actually slows any advance score music might have been making in the corporate music world as a result of a big success like Titanic.

But, it's the "big" score the majors are always interested in. If they are going to shoot themselves in the foot by always expecting big results after huge success, so be it. Hopefully they won't abandoned releasing scores altogether as a result of unrealized expectations.

Meanwhile, Varese will take advantage of the tide and nurture the score market a little more aggressively (relative term, I know) by releasing a multitude of different Titanic-themed collections. Pull 'em in!

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Originally posted by H Rocco:
He got the title wrong!!! Ban him, Pete! BAN him!

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Originally posted by PeterK:
There may be rules that apply to the market, but then again, what rule explains the success of Titanic and the failure of Mighty Joe Young? They are equally lucrative pieces of music, they both have pop songs on them, they both feature music by James Horner. What's the deal?

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Probably because people started to realize Horner rips himself (and others) off.

In fact, at the local High School Marching Shows over the past year or so, with about 8 high schools performing...nearly 50% of their show music is taken from film scores (though it is always amusing to see kids marching to the music from "First Knight").

Further, many of the local High School include film music regularly in their concerts--not just pops programs--and I heard some music from "Phantom Menace" as a pre-commencement prelude music last year!