"Dark Matter" and its tracks on the charts

Newspapers are dying. I didn't dispute that. But books are not. The ways in which the internet killed newspapers don't apply to books. All physical media are not equal. CDs have declined since they peaked at the turn of the century-- believe me, I'm intimately familiar with the numbers-- but they're not dead (and they're still a much bigger deal in some other countries, like Japan). LPs have enjoyed a resurgence in the last fifteen years. It adds up to a smaller but still significant market. And it's not a straight decline. CD sales actually increased in the U.S. from 2022 to 2023.

Anyway, my point wasn't to suggest that there hasn't been a decline in physical media. I was just saying that, when you make a broad statement like "I don't know anyone who has bought an album in years," that's almost certainly overstating things. Because there are still plenty of people out there buying these things, and you surely know some of them without realizing it, even though your core group of friends (who are probably similar to you in terms of demographics and taste-- this is true for most people; we congregate with like-minded people) are not buying them. I have literally had the experience on more than one occasion of being in a public place reading a newspaper and having someone say to me, "Nobody reads newspapers anymore." Do they think I'm an apparition? And the bigger point is that I'm not special, so if I'm sitting here in front of you reading a newspaper, there are probably millions of other people reading newspapers out there in the country. Are there hundreds of millions of people reading newspapers like there used to be? No, of course not. But there are still a lot of dinosaurs out there like me. Not to mention billions of actual dinosaurs that we call birds! 

igotid88 said:

It is amazing that they know by Saturday how many will sell that first week? 

Pre-orders make up a huge percentage of the sales, and then the Luminate tracking is instantaneous upon scanning of the bar code, so they get real-time information.

Vedd Hedd said:

All of that is fair.  Just to my point, though about the bolded...The only people I know who buy albums still are my siblings.  I have been sharing clips of PJ with friends and family, even in the case of my siblings, they only buy their favorite artist.  (Their PJ equivalent to me).  

A-ha! So you do know people who buy albums. I rest my case!

But I make a point of asking people about these things, cause it would be fun to share vinyls, etc.  Nobody I know is doing it.  Are there fringe people I know who buy the odd country album? Probably, I guess.  But take the same group of people I knew in High School and college, and back then thats all you did was buy albums...that same group, its nobody that I know.  Obviously its totally circumstantial, and to your point, sure there are probably people that buy the odd album here or there.  But its like dramatically reduced from whatever it was.  I guess, my point here is that I am not overstating things...I literally dont know anyone in my larger circle who has bought a physical copy of an album other than me and my sibs.  Im sure they exist.  But I just dont know of them. 

This was kind of my point-- the difference between "knowing" and "knowing of." I don't think I know anyone who's into weird sex stuff, but I probably do. I just don't ask them about it (although I bet I know who they are, but I'm not naming any names (*cough* Christopher)). Not that buying albums is like weird sex stuff but, then again, the way some people talk about vinyl, there might be some overlap.

Those millions reading papers are all over 60

All of them except me but, yes, and that's why that medium is dying. But records are really popular among Gen Z. It could be a fad that fizzles out in the coming years, but who knows? It honestly makes more sense for 20-year-olds to be into records than it does for 50-year-olds. The 20-year-olds have no idea what a CD is, and the LP has some cachet as a cool tangible totem they can hold onto in a world that, for them, is mostly intangible. The 50-year-olds, by and large, previously abandoned the LP when the CD came out. In 1990, today's 50-year-olds embraced the CD because it was more portable, more durable and sounded better. It also didn't require getting up to turn it over halfway through, and made it easier to bounce around between tracks, and could be used in the car. If many of the people who now claim to be "vinyl or nothing" had been so passionate in 1990, the format wouldn't have virtually died out. Now many of the same people who abandoned the LP and got rid of their turntables swear by the format, insist that it's the only real way to listen to music, and are convinced it's the purest, best-sounding format. (No doubt there are some true believers who never abandoned the format and always maintained that it was better than CDs, but that's a minority of today's middle-aged record buyers. Otherwise, again, the format would not have been phased out with the advent of the CD.)

Youre right, books aren't dying, in fact, they seem to be increasing.  But bookstores are have been decreasing aside from a few in really populated areas and then the mom & pops that are likely combined with antique stores.  Maybe there will be a renaissance of sorts for bookstores just like record stores. I know the pandemic killed off a bunch, too, although they were declining before that, but I think they have had an uptick in recent years. 

Barnes & Noble has gone from being the chain that killed the mom-and-pops to the chain that has kept booksellers alive in the face of Amazon. Look at B&N's numbers the past few years; they're killing it. One of the reasons is that the new management, which previously ran Waterstone's in the U.K., has allowed stores to tailor their stock to local preferences instead of having their inventory and displays dictated by corporate. B&N is kind of like a mom-and-pop corporate chain now.

I think there's just something about a book that can't be easily replaced. E-books obviously have a market, but people still like holding the thing in their hands, and many readers are just averse to reading anything longform digitally. Books are also great gifts. Giving someone an online subscription to a magazine or an e-book just doesn't have quite the same impact as giving them a book. And books are easily shareable, as libraries demonstrate.

JimFletcherPearlJam said:

Hey, that'll work. I was hoping for a top-five standing yet again, which will mean all 12 Pearl Jam studio albums will have placed in top five of the Billboard 200. Sweet! 

And if they only counted sales (as they should, and as they did until 2014), every Pearl Jam album except Riot Act would have hit either number one or number two:

Ten (2)
Vs. (1)
Vitalogy (1)
No Code (1)
Yield (2)
Binaural (2)
Riot Act (5)
Pearl Jam (2)
Backspacer (1)
Lightning Bolt (1)
Gigaton (2)
Dark Matter (2)