In the ever changing landscape of the music business, there’s one thing that people still love to pay attention to – sales. There was a time when selling a million units in a week was normal and pretty much required to hit #1 on Billboard’s top charts. Now it can take as few a 50,000 units in a week to hit #1. That’s a pretty drastic change.
Two weeks ago Lady GaGa released a new unit called Born This Way.
Prior to the release there were singles getting released. Those singles, to me, were not songs that I would have expected from her. Especially not the calibre of writing that I had come to expect from her. In hearing those singles, I was not of the mindset to purchase the release. Then Amazon made a bizarre push to sell her release at $0.99 for the whole disc. My head said, do I want to spend the buck to get the album? I had to think that because all the songs I had heard were lousy.
I finally decided to plunk down the $0.99 for the disc from Amazon.
In listening to the songs I was not happy starting at song one. It wasn’t until I hit song 14 when I finally heard something that made me think I didn’t waste the buck. Then the last song of the release was half way reasonable. What did I get for my buck? I got one song I really like, one song I kinda like, 13 other songs I couldn’t care about, and some storage space on Amazon’s service that won’t matter one bit in a few months.
Seems that the inflated sales figures she had in week one were very likely due to Amazon’s push of selling it at a buck. In week two when it was no longer a buck, the sales figures dropped drastically. If I’m not mistaken to about 1/10th from the week prior. Ouch. That’s a massive drop. Now people can speculate all they want and many are. Personally I think it’s a combo of the no longer a dollar thing combined with a really lousy set of songs.
However, I really dig the song Yoü And I. Despite the lack of good songwriting on the rest of the album, I’m fully enamored with this song. I think part of it is the fact that it was produced by Mutt Lang and Brian May. Fantastic duo to help increase the cool value of a song. Great production (which is consistent across the whole disc) and great musicians can always help. But this is the one song that also really has the better writing.
If you haven’t already got it, then I recommend only picking up this song for the buck.