Classical Sales

[mathias broucek]

Came accross this on Norman Lebrecht. Can this really be so?

The numbers are in for the first 12 days of 2014 and they are not good. Top of Nielsen’s sales chart as expected is the annual waltz set from Vienna with all the usual hullabaloo, but the total is meagre. Just 611 sales across the whole of the US.

Second best selling is Hilary Hahn with 411.

[verismissimo]

Mathias, my sense is that this is too short a time-length on too small a base sample to tell us anything useful.

[EnemyoftheStoat]

Mathias, my sense is that this is too short a time-length on too small a base sample to tell us anything useful.

Completely agree; just another example of NL's shock-jock tactics.

[teamsaint]

I would be interested to know where Nielsen take their data from.

In the UK book industry they certainly aren't comprehensive figures. As far as I am aware they are only from certain bookstores. Not sure if Amazon figures are included, though I think they are.

In the company I work for , a very significant proportion of sales are not reflected in Nielsen's returns.

What really matters is that the record company is selling enough to justify the release, which may in fact be quite a small number.
We had a thread on this some time ago. The model for sales and profit on these things is, quite clearly, getting increasingly diverse.

Pop and rock acts realised this years ago, and have found their own mechanisms.

Its a big mistake IMO to read too much into the sales figures for a few big discs. They might tend to be rather untypical of general trends I suspect, in any case.

[richardfinegold]

Came accross this on Norman Lebrecht. Can this really be so?

The numbers are in for the first 12 days of 2014 and they are not good. Top of Nielsen’s sales chart as expected is the annual waltz set from Vienna with all the usual hullabaloo, but the total is meagre. Just 611 sales across the whole of the US.

Second best selling is Hilary Hahn with 411.

It ain't my fault; I'm doing my share for classical CDs on this side of the pond