Well, folks, we’ve stumbled headfirst into a new year, and much like the famed swallows returning to Capistrano, or the assurance of crappy blockbuster movies come Memorial Day, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the corporate music world at 2007’s end-of-year sales stats. Although the Reaper had Edgar Bronfman and Warner Music on speed-dial throughout much of the year, and a few anti-RIAA jokers have instigated various major label underground deadpools – with surprisingly heavy betting taking place – the more positive-minded among us still feel that there’s a way out for the music biz. Still, considering the cold, hard reality behind last year’s sale numbers, any reasonable human might believe that the recording industry is circling the drain.

As a gambling man, I find the over/under on the music industry’s future fortunes to be an attractive proposition, but the short-term prospects of some of the biz’s bigger players are, in a word, frightening. Kind of like staring down a burly pit-bull…you know that the clampdown is coming, you’re just not sure when, or how bad it will be. Uncle Edgar and the geniuses over at Warner Music, for instance, have seen the company’s stock recently reach a new low of $4.57 per share, down from around $23 a year ago. If Bronfman didn’t own a big chunk of that nearly-worthless paper, rabid shareholders would be asking for his skull-on-a-pike by now. As for Mr. Hand and his merry pranksters over at EMI, when you start talking shit about your artists and saying that they’re not working hard enough for the peanut shells and spilled beer that you deign to throw their way, well, it’s just a matter of time until someone “accidently” torches the building at Hollywood & Vine, innit?

So, Rev, how bad was 2007 for the music biz, you ask? The Nielsen Soundscan numbers came through a couple of weeks ago and…let’s just say that it would take a lot of powder to pretty up this pig. Nielsen just chews up raw data, mind you, collected from thousands of scanners placed in music stores cross-country, and then spits ‘em out for meatheads like the Reverend to over-analyze and interpret. As reported by Billboard and other news outlets, overall album sales (including digital), dropped from 588.2 million in 2006 to 500.5 million units in 2007, a whopping 14.9% purge. Of this total, 449.2 million physical CDs were sold, a decrease of 18.8% from 2006, when 553.4 million discs were peddled. Digital albums jumped up over 50 million for the first time, a whopping 53% increase from ’06; digital albums now represent 10% of all album-length music sales.

The news on digital tracks (i.e. singles, what you used to buy on vinyl 45s) was encouraging to all but the most black-hearted industry buzzkills, with 844 million digital downloads sold, an increase of 45% over the previous year’s take of 582 million tracks. The era of the digital superstar has officially begun; whereas in 2006 only one song sold over 2 million downloads (Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day”), in 2007 a total of nine different songs sold that many. In 2006, 22 songs sold better than a million downloads; in 2007, 41 songs sold a million-plus downloads. Fergie, of the Black Eyed Peas, was the queen of digital in ’07, with over 7.5 million tracks sold; Souljah Boy Tell Em’s “Crank That” was the best-selling song online, with 2.9 total downloads.

Josh Groban’s Christmas-themed Noel album was 2007’s best-selling CD, moving 3.7 million copies for the year, all of ‘em coming during the fourth-quarter holiday season. Disney’s High School Musical 2 was runner up, selling 2.9 million CDs, while the Eagles’ self-released return to the studio, Long Road Out Of Eden, placed third, moving 2.6 million copies, almost all of them sold exclusively through Wal-Mart (*shudder*). Rounding out the top 5 were albums from Alicia Keys (2.5m) and American Idol’s Chris Daughtry (2.5m sold). Only one other bona fide rock album hit the top ten for ’07, with Linkin Park’s Minutes To Midnight selling a couple million copies, although Nickelback’s All The Right Reasons moved 1.8 million copies through the year, and there’s no reason to believe that it won’t do equally as well in 2008 given the band’s disturbing track record.

From a business perspective, nothing much changed: Universal Music retained the largest market share in the industry, edging up slightly to 31.9% piece of the pie (from 31.6% last year); Sony BMG remains in second place with a 25% share (down from 27.4% in ’06), and surprisingly enough for a label seemingly on life-support, Warner Music improved its take to 20.3% for third place, up from 18.1% last year. EMI remains in fifth place with a 9.4% share of the biz, down from 10.2% in 2006, and sitting behind the independent label segment, which altogether took 13.5% (up almost a full point from last year).

On the retail level, it’s interesting to note that 390,000 different album titles sold at least one copy through an online vendor, and total online physical CD sales topped 30.1 million sales, representing an ever-larger percentage of album sales and further supporting the “Long Tail” theory. Mass merchants represented 40% of all physical album sales, and chain music stores – hurt by the shuttering of Tower Records across the country – dropped to a 36% share of album sales. Gladly, independent music stores remained even with a 6% share of the overall business.

So, Oh great and wise music biz scribe, what does it all mean? I dunno…somewhere in the back of my brain I have visions of Rome burning while Nero has his fiddlers prancing around like the performers in a Broadway musical. We’re a full seven years into this modern-era downturn of the recording industry and major label executives still manage to embarrass themselves, stumbling over their expensive loafers to display their collective lack of intelligence. When Universal CEO Doug Morris – arguably the most powerful record biz 'Don' still standing among the “Four Families – literally confesses his technological ignorance and indifference in a magazine interview, you know that nothing good is going to come out of the current major label regimes.

Keep in mind that 400-million-plus compact discs is still nothing to sneeze at and that the Soundscan numbers don’t necessarily take into account retailers on both the smallish independent and largish retail chain end of the record biz foodchain. There are still a hell of a lot of CDs being sold each year, and thousands of artists writing and recording new songs. Music, I’m glad to report, is alive and well whereas the recording industry…well, not so much. They haven’t given a shit about anything that the Reverend has said in the past, so why would they pay attention now?

When the last remaining major label executive cashes his final bonus check, maybe they’ll take notice that the ground is shifting beneath their feet and they’re skating on either quicksand or molten lava. Perhaps by the time that this happens, clearer-thinking minds will have created some new and better system by which to pimp music….