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The music industry has a hot new format, which can generate huge sales, demonstrate fan loyalty, and dominate the weekly charts.
This is called the compact disc.
This week, K-pop superstars BTS opened No. 1 on the Billboard Albums chart for the fifth time with their latest release, “Be,” which accounted for the equivalent of 242,000 US sales, according to Nielsen. Music. Of that total, 177,000 were for sold copies of the eight-song LP as a full album. Two versions were available: a digital download for $ 9 and a “deluxe edition” CD for $ 51 along with a photo book, seven postcards, a poster and other goodies.
Last week, AC / DC topped the charts with a similar strategy, selling their latest CD, “Power Up,” in a $ 49 box that featured the band’s logo in neon and played a guitar riff from it. a built-in speaker.
The CD format has been slowly dying for years. In 2019, only 52 million albums were sold on CD in the United States, up from a peak of 943 million in 2000, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. But some bands, like BTS, have found ways to move records by super-serving fans with collectable packages, even though streaming remains the default format for most listeners. In its opening week, “Be” had 49 million streams.
The loyalty and promotional power of BTS fans is so great that they were seen as a major factor in the success of an initial public offering of $ 4 billion this fall by Big Hit Entertainment, the South Korean management company. behind the group. (Big Hit derives almost 90% of its revenue from BTS.)
Megan Thee Stallion’s “Good News” opened at No.2 with the equivalent of just over 100,000 sales, including 116 million streams. Last week, BTS and Megan Thee Stallion received their first Grammy nominations. BTS got a nod and Megan had four, including Best New Artist and Best Record of the Year for “Savage.”
Ariana Grande’s “Positions” is in third place, while Pop Smoke’s “Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon” is No. 4; Future and Lil Uzi Vert’s “Pluto x Baby Pluto” dropped three spots to No.5 in its second week.
Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ climbed 23 spots to No.6, after the vinyl version of the LP went on sale in Target stores and her new film, ‘Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions,’ began airing on Disney +. (Swift is in the running for six Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year.)
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