exploremusic

Here’s what I discovered over the weekend.

Here’s the Deal with CD Sales

The numbers are in from US CD sales from the first half of 2010—and they’re not terribly encouraging. Things continue in their death spiral. But what’s interesting is the number of Canadians that make up the top ten sellers so far this year.

Added up, the top ten records of the first six months of 2010 moved 11,147,000 copies. Of that, Justin Bieber and Drake make up just over 25% of the total. I don’t know what that says, but I thought it was interesting.

Biggest rock albums of the year so far? Jack Johnson with To the Sea (410,000 copies), Contra from Vampire Weekend (365,000) and the Iron Man 2 soundtrack, which is all AC/DC (346,000).

Those are all really low numbers. Added together, the top ten rock albums of 2010 have sold a grand total of 3.2 million copies with almost 10% coming from Nickelback’s Dark Horse album, which came out in November of 2008.

Even old records— catalogue titles—aren’t moving. The best seller is Only by the Night from Kings of Leon with just 248,000 copies.

Here’s the Deal with Concert Ticket Sales

All right, so people aren’t buying CDs like they used to. They’re still going to shows, right? Not really.

Shows by the Eagles, Simon and Garfunkel, Christina Aguilera, Limp Bizkit, the American Idol people, the Jonas Brothers, Lilith Fair and a bunch of others have either cancelled shows or cancelled tours entirely.

Many of those who are still on the road are discounting tickets heavily. In fact, in the US, the average price of a concert ticket has dropped about 6% after years of going up.

But things are different in Canada. Despite the hit resulting from U2’s postponed 360 Tour because of Bono’s back surgery, life is going on pretty much normally up here. In some cases, promoters are adding shows rather than cancelling them. So far, anyway.

Here’s the Deal with Nick Cave’s Book

One of the more interesting novels I’ve read in the last year is The Death of Bunny Munro by Bad Seeds/Birthday Party/Grinderman dude, Nick Cave. The audio book is especially good. Now it’s going to be adapted into a mini-series for TV starring Ray Winstone, who is a great British actor.

I don’t know how they’re going to do this, given the subject matter and the appetites of the main character, but in the right hands, it could be really, really good.

Here’s the Deal with Courtney Love

And finally, I had a long talk with Courtney Love on Saturday night. We met in her dressing room backstage after her show in Toronto and we spent almost the entire time talking about the fraud case she’s trying to build against at least a dozen people whom she says have bilked her and the Cobain estate out of at least $28 million—and maybe tens of millions of dollars more. Maybe hundreds of millions.

And you know something? I believe her. I’ve seen some of the legal documents and she explained a few things to me. I think she has a case.

It’s too much to go into here, but I’ve written a long blog on what we talked about.