Let the music play on
As with Michael Jackson, death brought Whitney Houston back into the spotlight, sparking a sharp rise in song downloads and album sales
A mix of triumph and tragedy helped make the Grammy Awards last Sunday the second-most-watched broadcast in Grammy’s history. The same effect was clear in record sales, with big gains for Adele, the night’s champion, and for Whitney Houston, the pop goddess whose death the day before cast a somber shadow over the ceremony.
Following a pattern familiar from the death of Michael Jackson, Houston’s music rocketed back on the charts and radio playlists as news of her death spread. For the week that ended Sunday, Houston had a nearly 60-fold increase in album sales, virtually all of it digital, and equivalent boosts in track downloads and online streaming.
She sold 101,000 albums in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, compared with 1,700 the week before, and 91,000 of those albums were sold digitally; she also had 887,000 downloads of individual tracks, up from 15,000 the week before. “I Will Always Love You,” the most popular song, was downloaded 195,000 times, and from Saturday to Monday it had 2,137 spins on the radio, up from 134 during the same period the week before. On Sunday there were 2.4 million streams of Houston’s songs, up 4,000 percent from the day before.
At her peak in the 1980s and ’90s, Houston was one of pop’s dominant sellers, with 11 No 1 hits and 55 million album sales in the US. But in recent years her career had stalled, and, like Jackson’s, her public image was often more associated with tawdry tabloid headlines than with her music. Her last Top 10 hit, in 2001, was a re-release of her Super Bowl performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” from 1991. With a low sales baseline Houston’s numbers last week were not enough to give her the top-selling album. Her collection “Whitney: The Greatest Hits” reached No. 6 on Billboard’s latest album chart with 64,000 sales, up from only 600 the week before. Her death brought Houston back to the spotlight, but some in the music industry question how long the interest will last.
“For a few weeks, or during the course of the fascination with the news cycle, you’re going to continue to see a sales spike,” says Bill Werde, editorial director of Billboard. “But ultimately radio is going to stop playing Whitney all the time and return to playing her sometimes, and sales will probably fall substantially.”
By comparison Jackson — whose music, like Houston’s, is released by divisions of Sony — had a 40-fold increase in album sales during the week of his death in June 2009, to 422,000, though only 57 per cent of sales were digital, SoundScan reported at the time. But fueled by coverage in the news media and the release of his concert film Michael Jackson’s This Is It that fall, he ended up the top-selling artist of the year, with 8.3 million albums.
Adele, who took six Grammys on Sunday, including the top prizes of album, record and song of the year, posted the biggest numbers of the week. Her album “21” (XL/Columbia), a juggernaut since it was released 51 weeks ago, sold 237,000 copies, pushing it to No 1 for the 20th week; it tied “The Bodyguard” soundtrack — a showcase for Houston, featuring “I Will Always Love You” — which also had a 20-week run in the top slot in the early 1990s.
Though sales of Adele’s music were already strong, the exposure from the Grammys always provides a bump to the show’s winners and performers. In recent years, with the rise of digital music and traffic on social media networks, that effect has come earlier and earlier in Grammy week, but the sales spike extends even into the show itself, with online retailers saying that many searches and sales come during the broadcast.
© The New York Times, 2012