Calendar watching

Members of the Montreal band Stars. Their latest album, In Our Bedroom After the War, was released online more than two months ahead of the Sept. 25 release date. (Arts & Crafts/CBC Radio 3)

Is it hip hop’s answer to the shootout at the OK Corral? Or more like the musical equivalent of your two best friends scheduling their weddings on the same day? Maybe the situation is a combination of both. Already an auspicious day on the calendar for obvious reasons, the next Sept. 11 is the date for an epic battle in the music world. That’s the day that the year’s most anticipated hip-hop albums — 50 Cent’s Curtis and Kanye West’s Graduation — hit stores.

To have two big hip-hop discs go head-to-head is an unusual event in the music industry, which is skittish about placing A-list titles in direct competition for the much-coveted No. 1 slot. At the same time, it’s an inevitable occurrence, given the music world’s move to emulate the movie business by placing a disproportionate emphasis on first-week results. This go-big-or-go-home mentality continues to create problems and pressures in the entertainment industry, especially as issues like schedule conflicts, declining sales and online piracy complicate the practice of choosing release dates for major new titles, be it a movie blockbuster like Transformers or a new album by Montreal indie heroes Stars.

The 50/Kanye tussle became the most notable locus of release-date anxieties as soon as their albums — both of which had been delayed several times already — ended up with the same release date. Billboard magazine’s director of charts and senior analyst, Geoff Mayfield, believes it’s partially a matter of bragging rights. “If you’re a big hip-hop artist, you don’t want to see another big hip-hop artist outsell you in week one,” says Mayfield in an interview from his office in Los Angeles. “You just don’t want that to happen.” Moreover, that miscalculation could poison the relationship between an artist and his or her record company. “You could end up with an unhappy artist if it doesn’t go to No. 1,” says Mayfield. “And that might be your fault and not the music’s fault.”

The pre-fight chatter in both MCs’ camps has been fairly low on bluster, though the reigning champ of gangsta rap has no doubt about who will shift more units. Speaking on Funkmaster Flex’s radio show on New York’s Hot 97, 50 Cent said, “I’m not moving under any circumstances,” and said West’s people are “too smart” to let him get the drubbing that’s surely coming to him. One of those people is Jay Z, the rapper and business magnate whose duties include running West’s record label, Roc-A-Fella. He thinks having two big albums come out the same day is “a fantastic thing for hip hop.” West expressed a similar sentiment when he told MTV, “I’d rather come out on a day like that, up against 50 — where people are excited about going to the stores and it’s an event and people talk about it — and be No. 2 on that day rather than come out and be No. 1 on a day nobody cares about.”

50 Cent's new album, Curtis, faces stiff competition from Kanye West's Graduation. Both albums are scheduled to be released on Sept. 11. (Universal Music Canada)

Whether consumers will have the disposable cash to buy one, both or neither album that week remains to be seen, but both artists must be concerned about matching past results. To give you a sense of scale, Linkin Park scored the highest first-week sales in North America of any 2007 release by selling 623,000 copies of its album Minutes to Midnight in May. But in 2005, West’s album, Late Registration, sold over 860,000 copies in its first week. Released the same year, 50 Cent’s The Massacre moved 1.14 million copies in four days, the fastest selling album since SoundScan became the industry’s preferred tool for tracking sales data in 1991.

In fact, SoundScan may be the largest factor behind the music industry’s fixation on first-week results. An information system that tracks album sales by recording data from cash registers in 14,000 outlets in Canada and the U.S., it replaced the recording industry’s traditional method of basing sales figures on how much product was shipped rather than sold. Until SoundScan arrived in 1991, it was far more difficult for record companies to get new products into stores in such large quantities at once, to let consumers know when those products would be there and, most importantly, to accurately know how those products were selling. Learning the latter told them how effective their marketing had been. SoundScan gives them that information immediately. Thus did SoundScan influence the whole nature of the music business, as the quest for those oh-so-tangible first-week results took precedence over slower methods (e.g., working several singles to radio, cultivating word of mouth) of shifting units. SoundScan motivated great changes in how the record companies did business. As Mayfield notes, only six albums ever debuted at No.1 on Billboard before SoundScan. (The first? Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy in 1975.) Now, Mayfield says that for an artist to shift several hundred thousand copies of a new album in the opening days of release and go straight to No. 1 is “fairly common.”

The change is akin to what happened to the North American movie business after the dawning of the blockbuster age in the ’70s. Before then, films rarely opened in many cities simultaneously — instead, they would circulate through theatre chains for months, earning grosses gradually. Even Jaws only opened on 409 screens in the U.S. in June of 1975. Though other major releases in 1977 were opening in anywhere from 200 to 800 locations, expectations were so low for Star Wars in May of 1977 that it was only playing 43 theatres in its first week. Again, the quest to maximize a new release’s impact created a greater and greater emphasis on early results. Thus it wasn’t so outlandish when Spider-Man 3 made $242 million on 4,252 screens in the U.S. and Canada in its first 10 days of release in May of this year.

(Columbia Pictures)

That box-office take was big news. Less well publicized was the fact its box-office take plunged 62 per cent between its first and second weekends, a typical dropoff. Hollywood’s business model now demands that its products make a lot of money very, very quickly, which is why getting the right release date is so crucial. Gitesh Pandya, the founder and editor of Box Office Guru, a widely read site devoted to movie-biz stats, explains from his home in New York that studios claim dates well in advance. “Nowadays, studios plant their flags on key release dates like they were prime pieces of real estate, and often do it a year ahead of time for major films,” he says. “In fact, most of the key weekends for 2008 have already been claimed.” That’s no exaggeration — you can already mark your calendars for the next James Bond movie, slated for Nov. 7, 2008.

“Whoever claims a weekend first will often scare away competitors, depending on how big the film is perceived to be,” says Pandya. “But sometimes a rival will claim the same date and then market conditions will force one to blink and move to a new date. Dates are so important, as you want to take advantage of extra time people have for holidays or students have for summer vacations.”

Though studios have traditionally used Friday openings to tempt weekend moviegoers with their freshest, flashiest wares, this summer movie season has seen a wave of openings on Wednesdays, and even earlier. Still, Pandya doesn’t think Hollywood wants to meddle too much with its release-date patterns. “There are strategic decisions to get in a couple of extra days of business before a bigger film opens the next week.”

The films are so tightly packed in the schedule that if one moves, others may have to follow suit. So when Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix moved up from July 13 to July 11, Transformers was pushed up two days to July 2, putting it in the unusual position of opening on a Monday night. “It’s all about absorbing the extra business before another juggernaut comes in and takes away part of the same audience,” says Pandya, who predicts that Transformers will end the summer with bigger results than the boy wizard can claim.

Obviously, the current system has a high degree of complexity and not a lot of flexibility, which is why studios avoid scheduling big releases against each other — for two expensive productions to underperform hurts everyone. But as Mayfield notes, the music industry’s move to adopt a model more like the movie business may not have been the healthiest trend.

“A lot of people in the music industry used to be jealous of the movie industry and its ability to maximize awareness of new movies coming to screens,” says Mayfield. “So they spent a lot of time and effort trying to elevate the awareness of release dates. SoundScan gave them a way by which they could judge whether they’d succeeded in that goal. And now that they’ve gotten there, they’re complaining because, ‘Gee, we’re too much like the movie business; if something doesn’t kick in right away, then it really has a chance of having a short shelf life.’”

Whereas the fate of a big movie rests almost entirely on that opening weekend, record companies traditionally had the luxury of saving an underperforming album by scoring a hit with a second or third single. Mayfield worries those days are over, and thinks that people in the music business have realized that emulating Hollywood is “not such a great thing.”

What with music sales declining — they fell 35 per cent in Canada in the first quarter of this year compared to 2006 — the method by which new titles hit the marketplace becomes even more crucial. Mayfield says that retailers are pushing record companies to make sure their release dates don’t conflict with those of big videogames and DVDs, products that often compete for consumer dollars in the very same stores.

But even if record companies make a more concerted effort to be careful about choosing release dates to appease retailers, their decisions are also increasingly influenced by fears of online piracy. When 50 Cent’s 2005 album The Massacre was leaked onto the internet, his label Interscope opted to release the disc five days ahead of its original date in order to counteract the effects. In 2004, Eminem’s album Encore was also rush-released due to similar circumstances. Mayfield says that there was genuine reason for concern in both cases but some artists since have used this excuse as more of a “publicity ploy” that implies there may be more demand for a CD than there really is. “We’re in an era in which there’s a lot of skepticism,” he says. “If a record company says, ‘We had to rush-release it,’ either some reporter or some consumer is gonna say, ‘You just want me to think it’s that hot, but it isn’t that hot.’” Moreover, a rush-release can create additional expenses and play havoc with the existing marketing campaign.

The cover of Stars' new album, In Our Bedroom After the War. (Arts & Crafts)

Yet in early July, a Canadian band and its label made an even bolder move. Within days of completing the band’s fourth album, In Our Bedroom After the War, the Montreal group Stars and the Arts & Crafts label decided to release online, more than two months ahead of the Sept. 25 release date. MP3s of the whole disc can now be purchased at services such as eMusic and iTunes (where it quickly topped the chart).

As Arts & Crafts president Jeffrey Remedios explains en route to Chicago (where his label’s bands Apostle of Hustle and Los Campesinos were playing Lollapalooza), “It stemmed from many conversations we’ve had together about how important it is to take care of their fans, about music piracy and about how we felt we had to proactively take action. We all grew up on physical retail and remain steadfastly loyal to the concept of buying hard copies of music (in fact we currently press all of our releases on vinyl).  However we cannot ignore that in the end we must give music fans what they want.”

Arts & Crafts had just begun to send out pre-release copies to media and knew Stars’ new music was bound to end up online. According to Remedios, if they’d waited for the physical release date, then they would’ve left fans with two choices: “wait two months to purchase the new Stars album or effortlessly download a pirated copy right now.” Says Remedios: “Some will never pay for music. But for those who want to support the artists, we felt they needed to be given a legal alternative to music piracy.”

This strategy does not come without repercussions. The already-ailing, traditional music retailers get cut out of the equation. Mayfield likens Stars’ decision to sell early online to what happened in 2005 when Alanis Morissette, trying out another new distribution channel, released her Jagged Little Pill Acoustic album exclusively at Starbucks, a move that alienated the music stores that had helped her sell millions of CDs in the ’90s.

As for Stars’ decision, Remedios says, “the only people who do not benefit from our doing this are the gatekeepers of the status quo. That said, I’ve had many conversations with physical retailers and for the most part, while they share our sadness for the falling interest in physical goods, they understand why we’ve done this.”

Whatever the fallout, everyone involved agrees these are tumultuous times for the entertainment industry. As the industry shifts to a digital model, the importance of, or even the relevance of, release dates will have to change accordingly. Though the powers that be have long trusted the sentiment expressed in the old jazz standard What a Difference a Day Makes, very different days may lie ahead.

Jason Anderson is a Toronto-based writer.

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