Saturday, January 30, 2010

Going Gaga

Grammys Go Gaga, via WSJ.
"Lady Gaga's towering digital sales, almost all of them iTunes downloads, only tell part of the story. In fact, much of Gaga's audience got her music for free, and legally. They have listened to free streams—by the hundreds of millions—on YouTube and the other online services that Gaga currently leads, according to research firm BigChampagne. On MySpace, Gaga has had 321.5 million plays. By contrast, singer Susan Boyle tallied only 133,000 plays, despite scoring the No. 2 selling album of 2009. A difference (among many) between Gaga and the dowdy Scotswoman discovered on a British talent show: Ms. Boyle's material, including "Amazing Grace," was traditional—and so were most of her buyers. Some 97% of her albums were sold on compact disc.
That tells you how pronounced the generational divide is," says BigChampagne founder Eric Garland. When it comes to the free streams that dwarf her still-impressive sales, Gaga isn't giving it away for nothing—musicians typically earn fractions of a penny each time a song is streamed on Yahoo, for instance. While most artists stand to profit more from high-margin CD sales, being embedded across the Web can pay dividends in exposure and the loyalty of fans."

2 comments:

D. Lapin said...

My guess is that the publicity will drive ticket sales, and that's big money. one sell-out crowd at a big arena is 20,000 tickets, and assuming $50 average seats, that's a cool million for one night. Her cut is probably going to be much heftier than what she would make on the equivalent income from CD sales.

Anonymous said...

...and, man, she had the privilege of singing and playing the piano with Sir Elton John, how cool is that?! Go Gaga!