Sales of recordings continue their slide

Finnish singles Top 20 entry needs weekly sales of only 30 records

Jake Nyman

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By the end of September, sales of recordings in Finland had fallen 12% from the same period in the previous year. The sharpest drop was in the so-called singles market, which saw shrinkage of 16.5%.
      The situation has now become almost grotesque, in that a single release can struggle into the lower echelons of the Finnish Top 20 for any given week with sales of just a few dozen copies.
      On the other hand, according to Jake Nyman, veteran DJ at the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) and the producer of Finland’s weekly official chart programme, there has been a contrasting rise in sales at the top end of the singles market. He notes that sometimes it is possible to hit the #1 spot with only a few hundreds in sales, but the bigger singles hits will shift over 1,000 copies a week.
     
The decline of the singles market is a widespread international phenomenon, and Finland is no different: by the end of last month, some 289,000 singles had been sold in this country, as against 346,000 in the first nine months of 2003.
      In order to top the album sales lists in the Christmas market, one would need to shift around 8,000 CDs, but in the dip that follows in January, sales of not much more than 1,000 could be enough to do the trick. Nyman notes that only a few years ago, it would take weekly sales of 10,000 to hit the top of the Finnish albums charts over Christmas.
      In the case of both singles and albums, sales in Finland are concentrated on just a few hit recordings. "If in a normal week the album #1 were to sell around 3,000 copies, then a release could get to something like the No.5 spot with sales of not much more than 700", says Nyman.
      The share of Finnish-produced music in the overall sales total has been increasing this year. There can be eight Finnish-made releases in the Top 10, which Nyman says is an excellent outcome.
     
As was noted above, the sales slump is by no means an isolated matter plaguing Finland alone. The decline in Britain has already led to discussions of the inflated status accorded chart success.
      A recent article in the broadsheet The Independent reports that last week’s singles No.1 was achieved with record-low sales of just 23,159 copies. A decade ago, this would not have scraped into the Top 5.
      Again, in the UK it is possible to squeak into the lower levels of the weekly Top 40 singles list with sales of a measly couple of thousand records, whereas six years ago it would have taken 6,000 discs to make the grade. The lists are by consequence relatively easy to manipulate.
      Jake Nyman admits that the current state of the singles lists in Finland means that they cannot aspire to any great measure of respect. The shape of the weekly list is determined to a very great extent by what DJs themselves buy in every week. Nyman notes that things could be put on a more sensible footing in the near future if online downloads were used as a criteria.
     
In any event the old glamour attached to "Gold Disc" sales has been rubbed off almost entirely.
      In 2001 the threshold figure for a Gold Disc in Finland was dropped from 20,000 to 15,000. "It is not enough. Going gold these days is no great achievement at all", argues Nyman.


Links:
  The Independent: Two thousand reasons why a Top 40 hit is nothing to sing about
  The Official Finnish Top 20 (YLE, in Finnish; contains albums and singles, and UK/US album charts)

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