ThatRetailChick

Interscope recently presented Eminem with a plaque for selling 32 million albums.  His highly anticipated release, RECOVERY, comes out Tuesday, June 22, 2010.  His last release, Relapse, came out May 19,2009 and has sold 1,935,000 pieces to date.   In the first week, Relapse sold 608,000 pieces.  My retail connects tell me that customers are more than ready for the new Eminem cd to hit stores!!!!

If you haven’t had the chance, make sure you check out Eminem’s website by clicking the link below and pay close attention to the STORE link and take notes!!!!

EMINEM

Reported by Ed Christman on BILLBOARD

Apple’s iTunes store, which emerged in 2008 as the top U.S. music account for the first time, widened its lead last year over former market leader Walmart.

According to my analysis of 2009 sales and market share, the top 20 U.S. music accounts accounted for 85% of the total account base. That’s down from 88% in 2008 and runs counter to an almost decade-long consolidation trend under which the top 20 accounts continued to capture an ever larger share of the total market.

That was due to declining market share among the brick-and-mortar accounts in the top 20. The top 20 merchants selling CDs and other physical formats comprised 49.3% of the account base in 2009, plunging from 57.5% in 2008.

Meanwhile, digital accounts in the top 20 made up a combined 35.5% of the total account base, up from 31.6% in 2008. That gain of nearly four percentage points came despite a decline in the combined share of mobile service providers, once touted as the recording industry’s next big thing. Collectively, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, AT&T and mobile content provider Zed accounted for 4.9% of the market, down from 6.6% in 2008. That was probably due to the declining number of ringtone downloads, as well as declining ringtone prices.

But iTunes more than offset the mobile decline, growing its share of the U.S. account base to 26.7%, up from 21.4% in 2008 and more than double the 12.7% share the company had in 2007. Last year’s share gain was helped by Apple’s embrace of variable pricing on digital tracks. But it remains to be seen if iTunes can continue to expand its market share this year, given that year-to-date digital track sales in the United States are down almost 1% from the same period last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

No. 2 account Walmart saw its 2009 share sink to 12.5% in 2009 from 15% in the prior year, no doubt hurt by the retail giant’s continued scaling back of floor space dedicated to CDs. More tellingly, Best Buy, which is also reducing the store space it devotes to music, had only 8.7% of the account base in 2009, down from its pre-Napster share of 10.7% in 2008. Broken out on its own, Napster had a 0.7% share in 2009, down from 1% in 2008.

Other accounts losing market share included Trans World, which was down nearly a percentage point to 2.9% due to a flurry of store closings, and Alliance Entertainment, whose share fell to 6.1% from 7.7% in 2008 due to business it lost through the liquidation of Circuit City.

As traditional music retailers close their doors and big-box merchants reduce shelf space for music, Amazon’s piece of the account base keeps growing. The merchant’s share stood at 7.1% in 2009, up from 4.9% in 2008. Its physical music sales alone accounted for a 5.8% share, up from 4.2% in 2008.

If broken out as a separate account, Amazon’s MP3 store captured a 1.3% share in 2009, up from 0.8% in the prior year and good enough to have ranked as the 10th-largest account. But that’s still well short of where major labels had hoped Amazon’s download store would be by now, dimming earlier expectations that it will be able to significantly reduce the labels’ heavy dependence on iTunes for digital sales.

You should know by now that I am pretty much an ATLien that has a love affair with west coast music.   That whole “gangstas don’t dance they boogie” thing that just drives me crazy!!! 

So, I was at the Dream’s listening session in Atlanta tonight and found myself dancing around with this cat named POPCORN  from the west coast.  I had heard some of his music before and was reminded to check my inbox for this new joint he did called TIME.  So I thought “let me check this one out and see what dude is talking about” since I had some extra TIME when I got back home.  I had such a blast dancing with him.  He was super cool.     

WOW.  Listen to it, share it, replay it and know that like POPCORN said… ”everything gone be fine in a matter of TIME“.  I had to remind myself of that this morning, so this song was also right on TIME;  and the way he raps then lets the sample just slide right into his verse…priceless!!! 

Shout out to SWEATBOX PRODUCTIONS for the dope track, and VISUAL VINYL for the dope video.  You guys are DOPE man!!!!!

Warner/Chappell Music represents an impressive list of songwriters and artists! Check that list out here: WARNER/CHAPPELL

HITS reports:

“Warner/Chappell Music took home BMI’s Publisher of the Year award at this year’s 58th Annual Pop Awards held Tuesday night in L.A. W/C songwriters were recognized for writing 12 of the most successful songs of 2009. Warner/Chappell Chairman/CEO Dave Johnson was thrilled with the honors. “It is a great reward to see how our A&R strategy has led us to develop such an incredible roster and a testament to the exceptional talents of our songwriters, as well as the leadership of Scott Francis and the dedication of Greg Sowders and the rest of the Warner/ Chappell team, that we have been able to play such a big part in the creation of many of today’s biggest hits.” Among the winners were Claude Kelly (Britney Spears’ “Circus” and Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You”); T.I., Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger, Joey Moi and Ryan Peake; Kevin Rudolf and Lil Wayne, Theory of a Deadman’s Dean Beck, Dave Brenner and Tyler Connolly, and Mich “Cutfather” Hansen (Jordin Sparks’ “One Step at a Time).”