Rap, Country Dominate Year of Slumping Music Sales
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Slumping music sales left the recording industry with a whopping New Year’s hangover, but rap star Eminem has plenty to celebrate.
In a year that saw CD sales overall plunge by nearly 9 percent, the Detroit-based rapper-turned-actor sold 7.6 million copies of his latest album, “The Eminem Show,” making it the biggest commercial hit of 2002, according to year-end retail figures issued Thursday by Nielsen SoundScan.
At the same time, the soundtrack to Eminem’s movie debut, “8 Mile,” ranked No. 5 for the year with nearly 3.5 million units sold.
Featuring songs from Eminem and other recording artists, “8 Mile” also returned Thursday to the top of SoundScan’s latest weekly sales chart (ended Dec. 29), dislodging country pop diva Shania Twain from the No. 1 spot for the first time since the debut of her new album “Up!” in late November.
The movie “8 Mile,” loosely based on Eminem’s life, opened at No. 1 at the U.S. box office in November to generally warm reviews and went on to gross more than $114 million, making the Grammy-winning rapper one of the few recording stars in recent years to successfully cross over to the big screen.
Eminem’s double triumph came in a year of music dominated by hip-hop and country music acts, which according to a recent tally by the New York Times jointly accounted for three-fifths of the year’s No. 1 rankings on the pop album charts.
Indeed, most of the top 10 albums of 2002 fell into one of those two classes as rap and country encroached further into the pop mainstream. But country music was the only genre to post an increase in sales last year, rising 12 percent over 2001 levels, according to SoundScan.
Industrywide, total album sales fell 8.7 percent from 2001 to nearly 650 million units, the second year-to-year decline in a row. A slump of nearly 3 percent the previous year marked the first sales drop in at least a decade. The major labels have blamed the sluggish economy and online music piracy for weak sales.
Eminem was the only artist in 2002 to surpass the 5 million mark. Fellow rap artist Nelly’s “Nellyville” release was No. 2 for the year, with sales of 4.9 million copies, followed by the debut album of Canadian teen pop ingenue Avril Lavigne, “Let Go,” at No. 3 with sales of 4.1 million units. Country pop trio the Dixie Chicks finished the year in fourth place, selling nearly 3.7 million copies of their latest album, “Home.”
Rounding out the top 10 were “Missundaztood” from pop-rocker Pink at No. 6, followed by hip-hop songstress Ashanti’s self-titled album, country star Alan Jackson’s “Drive,” Shania Twain’s “Up!” and the bluegrass-heavysoundtrack to the film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
In terms of market share, Universal Music Group, a unit of Vivendi Universal, continued to lead the pack, accounting for nearly 29 percent of total album sales in 2002. Warner Music, owned by Time Warner Inc., was No. 2 with 15.9 percent market share, followed by Sony Corp’s Sony Music Entertainment (15.7 percent), Bertelsmann AG’s BMG (14.8 percent) and EMI Group Plc’s EMI (8.4 percent). Independent labels accounted for the balance.
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