On a trip through London's Heathrow Airport this week, Lady Gaga tumbled off the impossibly high heels she was wearing and took a nose dive onto the linoleum floor. She quickly righted herself and continued on her way; her new album, however, isn't showing the same resilience.
Five weeks after posting the biggest first-week sales figure for any album in more than six years -- spurred by a two-day sale during which Amazon.com sold the album for 99 cents -- "Born This Way" has slipped to No. 8 on Billboard's Top 200 Albums chart on sales last week of just 49,000 copies -- only slightly ahead of "Alpocalypse," the latest from Weird Al Yankovic with a single parodying Gaga.
Most in the record industry expected "Born This Way" to show a steep drop on its second week of release, although perhaps not as steep as the 84% plunge it saw after the stellar first week. But the slowdown for "Born This Way" has continued to be more pronounced than many anticipated. Gaga spent just two weeks at No. 1 before Adele returned to the top of the chart.
"I can't remember that ever happening like this -- selling so much and then going down to so little, so quickly," said Brad Sheldon, music buyer at the Amoeba Music store in Hollywood. "We're stuck with a lot of copies now."
Music industry analysts say there are probably multiple reasons for the swift decline of Gaga's album. Among the potential problems: Amazon.com's bargain-basement sale price devalued it in the minds of buyers; Gaga fans are more interested in singles; her so-called "little monsters" are more likely to share or illegally download her music than other artists' fans are.
The full effect of Amazon's 99-cent "Born This Way" sale, a promotion for its new cloud service, is yet to be determined authoritatively. But it didn't endear her or her record company to other merchants who found themselves stuck trying to sell downloads and physical CDs for much higher prices. Amazon took a multimillion-dollar loss on the deal.
"We definitely weren't a fan of them doing that," Amoeba's Sheldon said. "It sort of devalues everything after that, and it raises the question of whether she's going to have to do that again on her next record."
Meanwhile, British soul singer Adele's "21," the album that "Born This Way" displaced at No. 1 upon selling 1,108,000 copies during its first week, sold more than double what Gaga's album did last week -- more than 101,000 copies -- keeping it at No. 3 behind new releases from R&B singer-songwriter Jill Scott and alt-rocker Bon Iver. Adele's album has sold 2.4 million copies since its release in February, making it the biggest-selling album of the year so far.
The Lady Gaga album's sales arc to date also is in striking contrast to Taylor Swift's "Speak Now," which logged first-week sales of 1,047,000 upon release last fall. By its fifth week, "Speak Now" had sold more than 2 million copies, compared with "Born This Way's" five-week sum of 1.5 million. (Lady Gaga's previous album, "The Fame Monster," has sold 4.2 million copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan.) "Speak Now" yielded the No. 1 slot to new albums from Susan Boyle and Kanye West then returned to the top of the chart for another four weeks at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011. It has sold more than 3.5 million copies in eight months.
0 Comments
Posts
