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On Jan. 14, violinist Hilary Hahn scored a rare gig for a classical music performer: She appeared on “The Tonight Show.”
And not just any “Tonight Show” – one during the final days of Conan O’Brien’s brief tenure as host. Everybody was watching. So it was no surprise that Hahn’s album, “Bach: Violin and Voice,” debuted that week at No. 1 on Billboard’s classical charts.
No. 1. It doesn’t get any better than that. Right?
The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales of 200 or 300 units are enough to land an album in the top 10. Hahn’s No. 1 recording sold 1,000 copies.
It’s not exactly news that album sales in all genres have been declining for years. Or that classical recordings aren’t top-sellers.
“The classical charts have always been looked at as in the 3 percenter club,” says Alex Miller, general manager of Sony Masterworks. “Three percent of total music sales are in classical music.”
The idea that the classical-recording industry is on the rocks, a suggestion raised from time to time in part because of strikingly low sales figures, is generally countered by the assertion that there are more classical recordings available than ever before. And that might be the reason so few of them are selling well.
SoundScan, the company that provides sales data to Billboard, says it cannot release exact sales figures to journalists. Instead, all numbers are rounded to the nearest 1,000, so sales of 501 copies are reported as 1,000, and anything less than 500 is “under 1,000.” On a recent classical chart, only the top two recordings managed to sell “1,000” copies. Every other recording (including, in its second week, Hahn’s) sold “under 1,000.” The official total sales of the top 25 titles amounted to 5,000 copies, an average of 200 units a recording (sorry, “under 1,000”). And yes, that includes downloads.
Is there any point to charting such low numbers? Billboard has wondered the same thing. The magazine has two charts, Classical Traditional and Classical Crossover, and combines them on Billboard.com.
“We have actually considered decreasing the length of the two separate charts,” says Silvio Pietroluongo, charts director of Billboard. Some charts, such as World Music, list only the top 15 sellers. Having 25 positions, he says, “may be a bit much.”
Weekly charts are not the best way to measure classical performance, industry insiders say.
“We don’t necessarily follow the bump of a new album,” says John Q. Walker of Zenph Studios, speaking about the “Re-Performance” release of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, released in 2007. “People hear it and tell their friends, and it keeps riding this wave.”
Miller says, “We do view our projects initially on a three-year basis,” adding that the Billboard charts show only U.S. sales.
“Murray Perahia,” he says, “is an artist that we take a worldwide perspective on. A few hundred units in any given week of Murray Perahia in the U.S. is part of the thousands and thousands that we may sell in Germany or France.”
Sales figures for those other countries were not available, but they appear to be higher. The soprano Anna Netrebko broke into the top 10 on the non-classical charts in Europe with a recent release. And Cecilia Bartoli’s “Sacrificium” has sold 300,000 copies worldwide since its October release – and 12,000 in the States.
There’s evidence that people in the industry look carefully at the weekly charts, nonetheless. The hip string trio Time for Three just released “3 Fervent Travelers” last month – more than a year after hitting the charts with a self-produced CD. Hoping to get noticed for the Grammys, the group registered that recording with SoundScan. It happened to be a week when the trio was appearing with the Indianapolis Symphony and selling CDs in the lobby.
“We sold more CDs than most groups sell in that bracket of time,” said Nick Kendall, one of the trio’s violinists. “We started charting after the first week of SoundScan.” The label E1 promptly picked the group up. The numbers that allowed this stellar rise to fame? “We sold over 200 CDs,” Kendall says.
The classical music field is caught in a bind when it comes to mass-culture benchmarks. On one hand, it wants to aim higher, presenting great art for perpetuity.
On the other hand, it searches for signs that it matters in a culture in which it’s marginalized – signs like winning Grammys.
If classical music can’t make money, it can’t stay alive. And it’s notable that recordings appear to do worse than concert ticket sales.
Are the low sales figures a sign of the field’s decline or that the charts are outdated? Miller says the charts are not for consumers but for those within the field.
“You need it for historical context,” he says: to measure how an artist is doing relative to his or her past chart performance. There is a relevance there.”
