The British singer known as Adele may seem to be a soulful, self-effacing young woman, but she's a monster.
No, seriously, she's the Jurassic World of pop music.
You may recall that, last June, the fourth instalment in the Jurassic movie series obliterated box-office records, grossing more than $208-million (U.S.) during its first three days in theatres. That not only made for the biggest-ever cinema opening in North America, it also meant the film took in a whopping three out of every four dollars earned at the box office that weekend: 76 per cent of a total $273-million gate.
The following weekend, Jurassic World continued to stomp through cinemas, earning $106-million: About 43 per cent of the $248-million brought in by all films in theatrical release.
Which brings us to Adele. On Thursday, Nielsen Music announced that her third album, titled 25, had sold more than three million units in the United States since its release on Nov. 20. That broke a record that had been held by *NSync since their No Strings Attached debuted with sales of 2.42-million units in 2000. (Sales figures for 25's first full week will be released on Sunday.)
While that was noteworthy, there's a Jurassic-like figure buried in her sales that's more striking: As Billboard noted, 25 accounted for 42 per cent of total music sales. (No Strings Attached comprised a relatively tame 16.7 per cent of all sales in its first week of release, according to Billboard.)
So, you may wonder: What happened to the idea that our era of technological wonder would spawn a revolution in which millions of voices could be heard and celebrated? For years now, we've watched the barriers for creators fall away: Equipment to make art – from cameras to microphones to postproduction software – is cheaper than it has ever been. And artists no longer have to depend on fickle intermediaries to distribute their work: They can upload to an array of digital platforms, spread the word on social media, and watch the bucks roll in! Or, more often, not.
Blockbusters, of course, are nothing new. In 1995 – the year of Toy Story and Batman Forever and Apollo 13 – the top 10 films at the North American box office pulled in about 24 per cent of the total gross, according to data available on BoxOfficeMojo.com. Last year, the top 10 gross comprised 26 per cent of total theatrical sales. The big difference? In 1995, only 280 films were tracked; last year, at least 702 movies played in theatres. (I say "at least," since some films that were released – such as Adam Sandler's bomb The Cobbler – don't even show up in the data.)
A little more than 10 years ago, Chris Anderson, then the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, coined the phrase "the long tail" to argue that, as he put it in a blog post, "our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of 'hits' (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail." Companies such as Amazon and Apple, which offer a bottomless supply of books and music and apps, would clearly be better than physically limited brick-and-mortar operations. Creators saw reasons for hope, and the rest of us felt that a more democratic culture could only be better.
But in Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment, which came out in 2013, the Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse pokes a thumb in Anderson's eye, arguing that the new worldwide distribution platforms have in fact facilitated globe-straddling culture to an unprecedented degree.
Of the eight million separate music tracks released digitally in 2011, Elberse notes, 102 of them sold at least one million copies – representing 15 per cent of total sales. On the one hand, you could point to the additional 14,904 tracks that sold at least 10,000 copies (pulling in 54 per cent of all sales), and cheer that more than 15,000 songs did half-decent business.
But that still means 0.1875 per cent of digital tracks accounted for 69 per cent of all sales. (The bottom six million tracks each sold fewer than 10 copies, comprising only 1 per cent of sales. That's one long, emaciated tail.)
That's because, while we can now effortlessly access more culture than ever before – allowing any one of us to become an aficionado of obscure bands or filmmakers or visual artists or writers – most of us remain remarkably passive consumers of culture. So when Adele shows up on a BBC special and SNL and The Today Show and Jimmy Fallon and CBC's The National in a masterfully orchestrated Pavlovian burst of global bell-ringing, we salivating millions click on over to iTunes and send her album shooting to No. 1.
The phenomenon of the One Per Cent isn't restricted to Wall Street. But nobody's going to call for a sit-in to protest Adele. Why, she's already sad enough! Haven't you heard her new album?
Simon Houpt