Music Sales

Another one bites the dust. The Virgin Megastore on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, just down the street from the shuttered Tower Records, will close when its lease is up in January. The rent is simply too high, Simon Wright, chief executive of Virgin Megastores North America, said Wednesday. "We're trying to reposition the business," Wright said, "and a lot of our stores are too big for the future, primarily due to the drop in music sales." The chain -- which Related Cos.

To the surprise of virtually no one, Adele's "21" is officially the top-selling album of 2011, with a final tally of 5.82 million copies, while the British soul singer's single "Rolling in the Deep" was the year's bestselling song with 5.81 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan's year-end sales report issued Wednesday. Adele's album entered the chart at No. 1 in February and has never dropped out of the Top 10. This week marks the CD's 14th nonconsecutive week as the nation's top-selling album.

The music industry received mixed news Friday: Declines in sales leveled off thanks to an increase in digital downloads, but consumers bought fewer new releases this year. Sales of music albums in the U.S. declined by 4.2% in the first half of the year, to 270.6 million units, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to data released by Nielsen SoundScan. The drop, however, was mostly offset by a 77% increase in digital sales of music tracks. The 280.

With negotiations for the sale of EMI Group dragging on longer than a Wagnerian opera, owner Citigroup Inc. has invited Universal Music Group back to the negotiating table this week after failing to break a logjam with the previous high bidder, Warner Music Group. Citigroup's overtures to Universal come two months after the bank initiated a formal auction for EMI, one of the world's oldest and largest music companies, with a roster of well-known artists, including Pink Floyd, Coldplay and the Beatles.

Global online music sales nearly doubled in 2006 to about $2 billion, or 10% of all sales, but failed to compensate for an overall decline in sales of compact discs, the music industry trade body said Wednesday. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry also said it would sue Internet service providers if they continued to allow identified digital music pirates to use their networks.

Starting today, the Anaheim Convention Center becomes ground zero for guitar geeks. It's the annual four-day trade show of the music products industry, and hotshot musicians from around the country will be there to check out the latest guitars, amps, electronic keyboards and digital recording gear. Staged by the Carlsbad-based International Music Products Assn., the event (and the trade group itself) still goes by its old acronym, NAMM, for National Assn. of Music Merchants.

Vivendi Universal, which is selling its Hollywood studios and cable networks to General Electric Co.'s NBC, said fourth-quarter revenue fell 9% to $9.08 billion as music sales declined and the dollar weakened. Revenue at Universal Music Group fell 19% to $2.1 billion. The unit suffered from a 17% decline of the dollar against the euro in 2003 and "difficult music market conditions." Revenue at Vivendi Universal Entertainment declined 4% to $2.2 billion, hurt by the declining dollar.

Worldwide sales of recorded music declined 1.3% to $33.6 billion last year as the U.S. market grew for the first time since 1999 and consumers bought more concert and video DVDs. The figures released Tuesday, which reveal the fifth straight year of falling sales for the record industry, do not include digital downloads or mobile phone ring tones, which music companies say would have made 2004 sales flat against 2003.

EMI Group cut its revenue and profit forecasts for the second time this year as music sales slump in the U.S. EMI shares had the biggest slide in two years Wednesday after the company said full-year sales at its recorded music division would fall 15% and earnings would miss analysts' estimates. London-based EMI last month predicted a 10% sales drop.

LOOKING to beat the heat? Visit a record store -- the aisles are apparently both chilly and empty these days, at least if you use the Nielsen SoundScan album sales chart as a thermometer. Only one CD sold more than 100,000 copies in the U.S. last week -- "Now That's What I Call Music!, Vol. 22," which sold 207,000 copies. Even that had a tinge of disappointment to it; it marked a 48% tumble from the previous week, when "Now" debuted at No. 1 on the chart. Billboard.

"Finding Neverland," a planned stage musical based on the popular 2004 movie, has been grounded. The La Jolla Playhouse said it was removing the musical from its 2011-12 schedule and replacing it with a revival of "Jesus Christ Superstar" imported from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada. The La Jolla Playhouse said "Finding Neverland" was canceled because the Weinstein Co. withdrew from the project. Harvey and Bob Weinstein served as executive producers on the 2004 movie, which was produced by Miramax.

In the last decade, Apple made the 99-cent download the standard unit of music sales. Now, Apple is reportedly poised to try a second transformation, enticing music fans to store songs online — "in the cloud" — instead of on a hard drive. If the company's iCloud helps persuade the masses to embrace cloud-based services, that could help reverse more than a decade of sliding music sales. That's a big "if," however, and much depends on the labels' willingness to change. The shift from physical CDs to digital files has been a mixed blessing for the music industry, opening the door to rampant online piracy as well as promising new business models.

Now that Warner Music Group Corp. has agreed to be sold for $3.3 billion to Access Industries, is a duet in the works with EMI Group? Warner's all-cash sale to the New York-based oil and media conglomerate, announced Friday, puts Access Industries founder Len Blavatnik in the pole position to bid for EMI, the world's fourth-largest music company, numerous industry analysts said. EMI is widely expected to be put up for sale later this year by its owner, Citigroup Inc. "I would think that the next step for Warner is to buy EMI," said Ted Cohen, managing partner at TAG Strategic, a media consulting group based in Hollywood.

A list of upcoming concerts across the Southland, with on-sale dates in parentheses. Gibson Amphitheatre Paquita la del Barrio, March 26 (Fri.); Bruno Mars & Janelle Monae, June 12 (Sat.) The Forum Rammstein, May 20 (Sat.) Hollywood Palladium Girl Talk, March 21-22 (now) Avalon The Sounds, March 29 (Fri.) Wiltern Queens of the Stone Age, April 12-13 (now); Hollywood Undead, April 30 (Fri.) City National Grove of Anaheim Black Country Communion, June 10; Steven Curtis Chapman, April 28 (Fri.

Roger Faxon may head a British music company, but he's no stranger to wild rides. The 62-year-old chief executive of EMI Music was chief operating officer of Lucasfilm from 1980 to 1984, when the studio released "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Return of the Jedi. " Faxon then worked for Tri-Star and Columbia Pictures, where he was senior vice president in charge of marketing, distribution and finance. He made the jump to music in 1990 as chief financial officer of EMI's publishing business when the industry was at its peak and the Internet was a mere curiosity for academics.

Digital music sales, which over the years have provided optimism for the music industry in the face of crumbling CD sales, are starting to flatline as consumers turn to a growing number of free and legal ways of listening to hit songs whenever they want. Sales of individual digital songs grew just 1% in 2010, down from 8% in 2009 and 27% in 2008, according a report released Wednesday by market research firm Nielsen SoundScan. The slowing digital numbers are a sign that the market for digital music is maturing, said Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, a digital music consulting firm.

What do Barbra Streisand and the Doobie Brothers have in common? Both have new concert DVDs hitting stores Tuesday, joining the flood of musicians who have released music in a format that continues to provide rare good news in a bleak period for the record industry. Through last week, CD sales for the year have increased a modest 9% while music DVD sales have shot up 123% over the same period last year, according to the Nielsen SoundScan sales monitoring service.

America has patriotism on its mind and in its ears, judging by the enthusiasm with which people are gobbling up patriotically minded records issued since Sept. 11. "As far as consumers are concerned, there's a huge demand right now," says Scott Levin of the Musicland-Sam Goody retail chain. "I have the feeling the country will continue to be very patriotic, even through Christmas. Music's been a big part of our heritage for hundreds of years, and that's not going to change."

Google Inc. started out 13 years ago as a simple search engine, but it has grown into a behemoth that has shaken up dozens of industries, including computers and cellphones. On Wednesday, it jumped into the music industry. The Mountain View, Calif., Internet giant unveiled a music search feature that lets users play millions of songs for free with an option to buy or rent them from several online music stores. Although not a direct threat to Apple Inc.'s hugely popular iTunes store, the new feature is expected to bolster the music services that compete with iTunes.

In the first few days after Michael Jackson's death on June 25, bereaved fans downloaded nearly 2.5 million digital copies of his songs, setting a record that's likely to stand for years. Before that, no music act had ever rung up even 1 million digital tracks in a single week.