Long Way to the Top: What does a No 1 album mean in 2020?
What does a No 1 album mean for Australian artists in 2020, when fewer and fewer listeners are actually buying albums?
On a Friday afternoon last month, Michael Fitzgerald was occupying himself with domestic tasks to distract from the sting of loss felt by many Australian musicians affected by the temporary silencing of live music because of coronavirus. While renovating his unit in Melbourne with his partner, he received a text message bearing incredible news he had not dared to dream: the Smith Street Band had achieved its first No 1 album.
The news wouldn’t be made public until 5pm on Saturday, when the Australian Recording Industry Association publishes its weekly chart updates. For now, it was a secret known only to a select few, including his bandmates in the six-piece Melbourne rock act, which formed in 2010.
Only a tiny percentage of musicians ever get to experience the thrill of reaching No 1 on their national album chart, and Fitzgerald had just become one of those lucky few. For a moment, the pure emotion of the accomplishment hit him hard. It felt like vindication of the years of hard work and devotion the bassist and his bandmates had put in, by writing dozens of songs and performing hundreds of concerts while slowly building an audience of thousands of devoted fans across the country.
Nobody knows that album better than Fitzgerald, as he’s the one who recorded and mixed it inside the band’s own Bush House Studios in regional Victoria. It was the first time he’d taken on such a role within the group, and the mental strain nearly sent him batty while second-guessing his own abilities as well as how his bandmates would respond to his creative decisions. Released by independent label Pool House Records, the Smith Street Band’s fifth album, Don’t Waste Your Anger, beat its previous best chart positions of No 3 for its fourth album, More Scared of You Than You are of Me, released in April 2017, and No 4 for Live at the Triffid, which was released a month earlier than Don’t Waste Your Anger as a fundraiser for the band’s crew, who were suddenly out of work because of the pandemic.
Fitzgerald couldn’t quite believe that his scrappy punk-rock band, led by proudly Australian-accented frontman Wil Wagner, had released the most popular album in the nation that week. The remainder of the top five included British pop singer-songwriter Dua Lipa, Canadian R & B artist The Weeknd, British pop star Harry Styles and US teen alternative pop sensation Billie Eilish — each of them enormously popular on a global scale and capable of clocking up streaming numbers well into the hundreds of millions for single songs.
The Smith Street Band bested those overseas contenders, all of whom have reached No 1 previously, by encouraging its fans to pre-order vinyl, CD and merchandise bundles through Pool House Records online, as well as digital downloads of the album via Bandcamp, a web storefront favoured by many independent musicians as it pays between 85 per cent and 90 per cent of profits directly to artists.
In the week of sale between April 17 and April 23, Don’t Waste Your Anger recorded 1752.97 sales, according to ARIA data seen by Review. The No 2 album, Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, recorded 1752.31 sales, with the decimal points coming from the manner in which ARIA calculates streaming volumes as fractions of a single album sale. In other words, the Melbourne rock band beat the British pop giant by less than one unit; 0.66 units, to be precise.
More surprising, though, was the fact that, in a nation of nearly 25 million people, it took only 1752 album sales, or thereabouts, to top the charts in that particular week, which came in the midst of the lockdown period when many retailers were closed.
These figures are reported to several dozen of the association’s members each week, so among the Australian music industry they aren’t exactly a closely guarded secret. ARIA itself does not officially comment on sales numbers, but a spokesman has confirmed to Review that the winning debut for Don’t Waste Your Anger coincided with one of the lowest weeks of album sales since it began calculating charts in 1984 — but not the lowest overall.
For the Smith Street Band, though, those fractions of numbers don’t matter a jot. The only numeral that will really matter in the long view of history is No 1, even though it’s something the group never aimed for.
“I usually reserve that for artists like Ed Sheeran, the megastar sort of commercial artists,” Fitzgerald says of the top spot. “I think it’s pretty cool when Australian bands like Violent Soho and Dune Rats get it. They deserve it — but with us, I’m a bit more surprised that it’s happened. It’s unexpected, but it’s really cool. We can say that we’ve had a successful album without feeling embarrassed or exaggerating it. If more people bought our record in the lowest-selling week in history than some big, major label artist, it means that people who like our band are not holding back on buying our stuff. It’s a really big achievement for us, and everyone’s really excited about it — and we did it all ourselves.”
Decades ago, the weekly ARIA album chart positions could be observed at a glance by anyone strolling past a music retailer, as the rankings of the most popular recordings were displayed prominently in storefronts and on back walls, and sometimes attached to listening stations where customers sampled the goods before buying. As well, bundles of printed sheets of the weekly Top 50 were sent to record stores for buyers to take home, while some newspapers published the charts as a way of telling readers who was top of the pops. Today, with store footprints greatly reduced and about 80 per cent of the Australian music market driven by sales from streaming music services such as Spotify and Apple Music — or “stream equivalent albums”, as ARIA has dubbed them — the only time most casual fans might see or hear anything to do with the weekly album chart is if they see an artist sharing news of a good result on social media.
“Bloody number one ay?! ARIA you gotta know that we are stoked as! Thanks to everyone who has grabbed a copy of Everything Is A-OK so far. The support we’ve received during this very tough time has been incredibly humbling,” Brisbane rock band Violent Soho wrote on Facebook on April 11 after securing its second No 1 since 2016.
“Wow, Hilda has debuted at No 1!” pop artist Jessica Mauboy wrote on Facebook after the release of her fourth album last October. “To know that everyone has connected with Hilda and embraced my story as their own is so humbling. It makes me so grateful for everyone’s support.”
“F..king STOKED our album has landed at No 1 in the country!!” Brisbane punk rock trio Dune Rats wrote on Facebook in February to announce their second chart-topper since 2017. “We want to thank everyone who has supported our band, this one’s going straight to the pool room! We owe you all a frosty beer!!!!!!”
While the honour of the top spot — and the agony of falling short at No 2 — is not lost on artists and the teams around them who work hard to maximise their sales, the actual numbers required to achieve this goal have steadily dwindled.
News reports from 2010 suggested a new low-tide mark for the domestic record industry when British metal act Bring Me the Horizon sold 3600 copies of its third album to reach No 1. In 2016, News Corp reported that US metal band Disturbed set another new low with 2140 sales of its sixth album, Immortalised, in one week.
In the past 20 years, three swings of the axe have sliced album sales down to a fraction of their former heyday. First, peer-to-peer software such as Napster and Limewire allowed savvy listeners to illegally swap their favourite tracks, often divorced from the album format.
Second, the music industry eventually came to grips with this dramatic shift by offering tracks for sale individually, with Apple’s iTunes storefront launching in 2003 and selling more than 35 billion songs worldwide before it was retired last year.
The third swing resulted from what superseded iTunes: Apple Music, a subscription music service launched in 2015 to compete with the likes of Spotify, Tidal and Amazon Music. In exchange for a monthly fee to one of these providers, listeners could stream as many songs as they wanted for less than the average new-release CD used to cost. As a result, the vast majority of consumers stopped buying CDs altogether, with many globally popular artists today printing only boutique-sized runs of a few hundred or a few thousand copies of CD and vinyl. Some opt not to bother with the physical product at all, with the production seen as an unnecessary cost for limited reward when labels and artists know that the vast majority of their teenage and young adult audiences are committed to streaming, and wouldn’t know how to operate a turntable if their lives depended on it.
This trend has presented Australian artists with something of a competitive advantage, though, at least when it comes to first-week sales, as a well-run domestic marketing campaign can direct hardcore fans to spend a little extra on a physical product that now holds the primary function of being a collector’s item, or a token of gratitude from fan to artist that feels more personal, permanent and meaningful than tapping a phone screen to add a few songs to a digital playlist. Data supplied by ARIA to Review shows that while the shift in consumer behaviour across the past decade has seen many more Australian artists achieve a No 1 album — 99 in the 2010s, compared to 65 in the 2000s and only 43 in the 1990s — the number of weeks an album spends in the top spot is declining. In the 2010s, Australian albums spent 126 weeks at the top, down from 166 weeks in the 2000s, although Delta Goodrem’s record 29-week stay atop the chart with her 2003 release, Innocent Eyes, had an inflationary effect on the latter number.
Even for the most popular Australian acts, the dominance of streaming services means that the norm now is for a No 1 debut followed by a gradual decline down the chart. The last time an Australian release spent two consecutive weeks in the top spot was December 2016, when John Farnham and Olivia Newton-John managed two weeks at No 1 with Friends for Christmas; before them, it was Mauboy’s soundtrack for The Secret Daughter, which held on for three weeks the month before.
The Smith Street Band’s recent chart highlight illustrated this trend in the most extreme fashion: a week after reaching No 1, it was superseded by another Australian rock group in Perth act Birds of Tokyo. Worse still, Don’t Waste Your Anger had dropped out of the top 50 entirely. This indicates how low its streaming numbers were in the second week, but it was also something of an anomaly as the band had announced the album’s release only a fortnight earlier, meaning physical stock was not yet available, so sales from retailers such as JB Hi-Fi won’t be calculated until the product actually ships — at which point, the release is likely to see a second wave of sales and chart again.
Clearly, consumers have voted with their ears, as the data across the past decade, both here and in bigger markets overseas, show an increasing audience preference to stream single songs rather than purchasing an album, or even playing it all the way through. The record-buying public is diminishing as the body of engaged music listeners continues to grow, but the album format itself is not dying. It’s not even displaying the beginnings of flu-like symptoms.
The power of creation ultimately lies with the artists and, while a generational divide has opened up between listeners, the sentiment to shun albums has not yet become widespread among musicians. Like most listeners aged 30 and above, those same artists grew up admiring the long-player format. To them, the format still matters.
It is among the toughest challenges in popular music to write a collection of great songs packaged as one, which is why many artists — young and old — continue to strive to add their names to the lists of classic albums that have stood the test of time, in the hopes that we’ll all be listening, singing along and talking about their work for many years to come.