U2 Still Rising in the Face of Decreased Album Sales
In 2008, U2 announced that its next record– their twelfth in nearly thirty years – would be released in 2009. Mission: media blitz. Talk shows and late shows and award shows, oh my! For a while it seemed as if U2 had some stunt doubles skipping across the globe to force public interest onto their record. Grand statements from the band and superlatives like “most experimental” and “best this decade” were dropped early and often, like so many pieces of confetti in a crowed arena. Despite a saturating plethora of promotional appearances and strategies, U2’s most recent record, No Line on the Horizon, has shown sales numbers that are considerably lower than expected.
Don’t get me wrong…484,000 copies during its release week in March of 2009 were moved, and that’s a lot considering the impending and inevitable death of the compact disc. In that same week, the album was certified platinum in Brazil, a record for that country. That’s over one million records sold in one week. No Line also debuted at number one on the charts in nearly a dozen countries, and is the seventh such U2 record to do so in the United States – third only to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. So, you might ask, where do I get off saying that the album’s sales are down.
When you compare the 2009 No Line numbers in week one to U2’s 2004 album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, the story becomes a bit clearer. Atomic Bomb sold 840,000 in its first week. That’s nearly twice as many records in its first week! Heir-apparent Coldplay moved 721,000 units in week one of their 2008 Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends in the wake of an overwhelming promotional campaign similar to that surrounding No Line. So, is it just a change in the times, or are the listeners losing interest? Is U2 really still the biggest band in the world?
Maybe? Though the only evidence of this is the fact that their album only sold HALF-A-MILLION COPIES in its first seven days of sale, somehow this seems to be a conclusion that many people are trying to draw. How significant is this drop in album sales? Historically, bands don’t spend three decades together without a dip in sales and interest, so it is only natural that U2’s perpetual ascent should come to an end at some point, but this is more of a plateau than a downturn.
U2 still had a number one record, album sales are very steadily decreasing, and people are still paying hundreds of dollars to see them play massive live productions of the records that they’ve stopped buying by the millions. Many bands this decade have made the switch to a live-focus because it is considerably more lucrative, especially given the aforementioned decline in album sales overall. The music industry – despite its best efforts – no longer revolves solely around numbers of records sold as it did in the 1960s – 1990s, and no doubt millions of others (perhaps more than in 2004 due to the current economic circumstances) illegally downloaded No Line on the Horizon. Relevance can no longer be measured by album sales, even in the face of an all-out media blitz like the one perpetuated by U2 this year. People still flock to the shows, still love the music, and still clamor for more every few years. So how can the end of U2’s reign be near? Touted as a massive career development, No Line has proven to be a relative commercial disappointment but a critical success – isn’t that the sign of a new beginning?
