New Music For Monday – RED – Until We Have Faces

For some reason Christian hard rock as a genre has always seemed somewhat of an oxymoron and while Christian music is its own genre, it is commonly is stereotyped and therefore overlooked by mainstream audiences.  So, in some respect hybrid classifications are necessary in order to reach target audience.

RED is a Grammy nominated Christian hard rock band from Nashville, Tennessee that was established in 2004.  Their third album “Until We Have Faces” releases Feb 1^st from Sony.  Early reviews of the album by Christian publications have given the album 4.5 of 5 stars, while music publications outside the religious realm peg the albums at 3 of 5 stars. 

You can be the judge as the album is available to listen to now on AOL by clicking here or you can copy and paste the following into your web browser: http://music.aol.com/new-releases-full-cds/#/5

The State of the Music Industry

The bleeding hasn’t stopped for the music industry as album sales plummeted 12.8% and digital track sales flattened to a meager 1% gain for 2010, according to figures issued Wednesday by Nielsen SoundScan. 

Album unit sales dropped to 326.2 million, from 373.9 million units in 2009. The 2010 drop nearly matched 2009's decline of 12.7%.

Overall album sales, physical releases and digital "track equivalent albums" -- fell 9.5%, to 443.4 million units from 489.8 million in 2009. This compared to a drop of 8.5% in 2009.

Just four albums sold more than 2 million units last year; the No. 10 bestseller, Ke$ha's "Animal," barely inched past the 1 million mark, with 1.14 million sold.

In terms of 2010 market share, Universal Music Group led the four majors with 31.4% of albums sold. Sony Music Entertainment ranked No. 2 with 27.4%, with Warner Music Group trailing behind with 19.8% and EMI Music a distant fourth with 9.6%. The independent sector outdid EMI with an 11.6% share.

Rapper Eminem claimed the 2010 album sales championship, moving 3.4 million copies of "Recovery." Country acts trailed only slightly among the top sellers: Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now" placed second with 3 million, while Taylor Swift's late-year release "Speak Now" came in a close third with 2.96 million.

Swift was the top-selling album artist of '10, notching total sales of 4.47 million, followed by Eminem (4.32 million), Lady Antebellum (3.85 million), Justin Bieber (3.73 million) and the cast of the Fox series "Glee" (3.6 million). Swift has sold more than 4 million albums per year for the past three years.

Just four albums sold more than 2 million units last year; the No. 10 bestseller, Ke$ha's "Animal," barely inched past the 1 million mark, with 1.14 million sold.

New Michael Jackson album, but is it really Michael?

After his death Michael Jackson became the best-selling artist of 2009 in the United States and sold over 35 million albums worldwide. Based on the staggering sales numbers, Sony, earlier this year, announced that they had signed a new deal with the Jackson estate to extend their distribution rights to his catalog until at least 2017, as well as to obtain permission to release ten new albums with previously unreleased material and new collections of released work.

Michael Jackson is back in stores with “Michael” a new album of material released by his record label against the wishes of his estate.   

Criticisms by his mother, Katherine, and brother, Randy, claim that one of the songs features a lead vocal track that is not Michael's. In a statement, Sony Music Group countered that it had "complete confidence in the results of our extensive research, as well as the accounts of those who were in the studio with Michael, that the vocals on the new album are his own." 

Ahead of the album's release, a lawyer for Michael's father Joe said that Michael "would never have wanted his unfinished material to be released." Will.i.am, who collaborated with Jackson for the album prior to his death, also criticized the release, saying it was "disrespectful" to release the unfinished material because Jackson was not able to give it his blessing.

It will be argued that the record should not have come out, that Jackson himself would not have authorized its release - were he alive - until all aspects met his approval.  The album is in stores now, or you can listen to it for a short time by clicking here, or cutting and pasting the following link into your web browser: http://music.aol.com/new-releases-full-cds/#/1

* news > LONG LIVE THE KING

Regardless of how you feel about Michael Jackson and his personal life, what he has done for the record industry since his death has been staggering. SoundScan numbers for 2009 are out and Michael again is king.

Market share by record label is pretty much stagnant these days since the advent of file sharing, the digital age and iTunes. At the end of 2008 Universal held the number one spot with 31.5% percent of the market, followed by Sony, 25.3%, Warner, 21.3% and EMI with 9%. Indie labels round up the rest of the sales claiming a little under 13% of the market.

Since his death in June Michael has sold over 10 million albums, catalog sales that rival the top artists with new releases. You don’t see him in the top ten charts because his material - previously released is considered catalog, a classification reserved for albums that have fallen off the charts. Michael’s catalog sales on their own lifted the record industry a staggering 2.8% in 2009 and gave Sony a nearly 3% market share edge.

While Universal is still at the top of the heap, it took the biggest hit losing about 1.3% of it’s market share. Indie labels also took a big hit with about the same loss of market and Warner followed with a .75% loss. Amazingly EMI was able to gain about .25% in sales on the larger labels. So, rounding out 2009 - Universal still sits at the top of the hill with 30.2% of the market followed by Sony now at 28.5%, Warner at 20.5% and EMI at 9.2%. Indie sales round out the market at just over 11.5%.

No doubt some execs at Sony have Michael Jackson to thank for their Christmas bonuses.