Before radio, before a real record industry, the sheet-music business couldn’t see the point of working a song that would be dead on 26 December. The notion that it might be a seasonal insurance policy, returning year after year for decade after decade, never occurred to them.
.. Had America entered the war in Europe in 1939, ‘White Christmas’ might have been just a hit record from a so-so movie. Instead, 1942 was the American serviceman’s first Christmas away, in the Pacific, under glorious sunny skies that only made home seem even more distant. In Operation Shylock, Philip Roth wrote:
‘God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas’. The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ – the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christmas – and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow… He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely!’
Who Is Really Paying for Adele?
If Adele and Taylor Swift take Spotify down, they’re going to take the industry with it. The very fact that Adele is able to break ’N Sync’s record at all surely has much to do with the fact that streaming has helped to make her so immensely popular in the first place.
Adele Goes Viral, No Selfies or Tweets Needed
The success of Adele’s “25” is all the more remarkable given how the landscape of music retail has changed since 2000, when some 700 million CDs were sold annually through a network of chains like Tower, Sam Goody and HMV, as well as in big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City that devoted considerable floor space to music.
.. Last year just 141 million CDs were sold in the United States, according to Nielsen. An additional 106 million albums were sold as downloads.
.. But Adele’s success may also be because of her following among a demographic group that the youth-obsessed pop music world does not often focus on. According to Nielsen, which has studied the demographics of the fans of various pop acts, the typical Adele fan is a college-educated woman aged 25 to 44, who watches “Family Guy” on TV and likes to shop at Target, Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works.
The Keys to Enya’s Kingdom
Her success so deeply contradicts accepted industry wisdom that it’s inspired a term — “Enya-nomics” — to describe it
.. In her real life, she checks her email once every few weeks, and even then, very quickly. “It feels so cold,” she says, making a face like she’d bitten into a lemon. “The energy is no good. I’d rather go for a walk.”
.. Her style has been derogatorily described as Muzak or New Age — the aural approximation of a warm bath — but might be more fairly described as ancient choral music on synth steroids.
.. She’s referring to the work of the so-called “triad” that make up Enya, the musical entity. Enya conjures the melodies; husband-and-wife team Nicky and Roma Ryan are responsible for the production (him) and lyrics (her).
.. the sixth of nine children.
.. Enya was in the deep middle of the birth order. “Let’s say there’d be a question like ‘Will we go to the pictures today?’” Enya recalls. “What chance did I have to say yes or no?” At this, she laughs: It’s not a point of resentment. “By the time it came down to number five, — that’s me — it was just like, Here we go. It was difficult to be heard, but I was very comfortable with that because I was able to be myself, able to be let alone.”
.. “And my family, we’d have to be careful speaking Gaelic: If you did, you were pinpointing where you came from, and it was too political at the time. Whereas for us, it was our first language, and we didn’t see anything wrong with it.”
.. Now she overlooks Bono’s house. “It’s really quite covered,” she says bashfully. “There’s a lot of trees. But you do see the top of his house.”
“We meet very often,” she admits. “Because of the areas we frequent to eat, I see a lot of him.”