Please – Not All At Once

Although record stores enjoy their best time in the lead-up to Christmas, they’re now telling the record companies that the seasonal glut of new releases is damaging sales.

Kim Bayley from the UK’s Entertainment Retailers Association says that “cramming” so many records into the last quarter is causing problems for the shops and their customers.

“The first half of 2012 has seen one of the weakest release schedules retailers can remember in both music and video games,” Bayley told BBC News, urging the record companies to spread their product throughout the year.
 
There’s evidence to suggest that spreading the product won’t necessarily improve overall sales.
 
In August 2011, Talk That Talk – the latest Rihanna album – set a new record for being the lowest-selling No. 1 album in memory, as it only needed to shift 9,578 copies to reach the top.
 
In May Emeli Sande reached No. 1 by selling only 13,430 copies of Our Version Of Events.
 
These mid-year blips may be exceptions as the BPI says the average sales for a No. 1 album in 2011 was 109,175, the highest it’s been in six years. 
 
The summer of 2012 may have also suffered because customers were distracted by big events such as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, Euro 2012 and Olympic and Paralympic Games.
 
However, even before the EC ruled on its EMI buyout, Universal – the world’s biggest label – said it was lined up for a particularly busy close to 2012.
 
 “In December we’ll sell 20 percent of all the albums we’ll sell in a year, so it’s still a big opportunity,” Brian Rose, managing director of the commercial division at Universal UK, told BBC. “We don’t put all our hopes into an autumn release period – we are very much a 52-weeks-of-the-year business – but there’s solid business reasons to release a lot of them in the autumn.” 
 
ERA spokesman Gennaro Castaldo says retailers are concerned about big releases all arriving at the same time, what he described as “the congestion” in the schedule.