{"id":3197,"date":"2008-10-24T16:43:31","date_gmt":"2008-10-24T20:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=3197"},"modified":"2008-10-24T16:43:31","modified_gmt":"2008-10-24T20:43:31","slug":"acdc-a-blockbuster-despite-downloads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/10\/24\/acdc-a-blockbuster-despite-downloads\/","title":{"rendered":"AC\/DC a blockbuster despite downloads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The legendary <strike>British<\/strike> Australian rock band AC\/DC is one of the few holdouts when it comes to selling music through the iTunes record store, a stand the group has taken in part because it refuses to sell individual songs as singles &#8212; &#8220;We don&#8217;t make singles, we make albums,&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/arts\/main.jhtml?xml=\/arts\/2008\/09\/25\/bmitunes125.xml\">says guitarist Angus Young<\/a> &#8212; and Apple won&#8217;t let the band restrict its iTunes sales to just albums. That&#8217;s why its new album, <em>Black Ice<\/em>, is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/life\/music\/news\/2008-10-19-acdc-main_N.htm\">exclusively being sold<\/a> through Wal-Mart stores, and it may also have something to do with the fact that the record has been topping the BitTorrent download charts as well.<\/p>\n<p>According to TorrentFreak, just five days after the album was leaked on BitTorrent it had already <a href=\"http:\/\/torrentfreak.com\/acdc-electrify-bittorrent-album-downloads-with-black-ice-081012\/\">been downloaded<\/a> 400,000 times. Download-tracking firm Big Champagne said that in the first week it was available (the leak occurred on October 7, and the official release was on October 20) it was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theage.com.au\/news\/entertainment\/music\/a-million-people-have-heard-the-new-acdc-album-but-no-one-hasbought-it\/2008\/10\/16\/1223750231385.html\">being downloaded<\/a> about 100,000 times a day. If that rate continued &#8212; and there&#8217;s no reason to think that it hasn&#8217;t &#8212; then the album was downloaded more than a million times before it went on sale.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Has that affected physical sales of the record? There are only a couple of days worth of statistics to go on, and those are estimates, but it doesn&#8217;t appear to have hurt CD sales through Wal-Mart. According to Billboard magazine, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.billboard.com\/bbcom\/news\/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003876402\">sources said that<\/a> close to 200,000 copies of Black Ice sold on the first day alone, and music-industry tip sheet Hits Daily Double said that based on first and second-day sales, the album <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hitsdailydouble.com\/news\/newsPage.cgi?news07304\">could sell as many<\/a> as 800,000 copies in its first week. That would make the record the biggest seller for record label Sony BMG in more than two years.<\/p>\n<p>Demand for AC\/DC&#8217;s music no doubt has something to do with the fact that the band &#8212; which has sold more albums than anyone but The Beatles &#8212; hasn&#8217;t released a new record in about eight years. But it&#8217;s interesting to see that almost a million illegal downloads of Black Ice doesn&#8217;t seem to have hampered sales of the physical product at all.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The legendary British Australian rock band AC\/DC is one of the few holdouts when it comes to selling music through the iTunes record store, a stand the group has taken in part because it refuses to sell individual songs as singles &#8212; &#8220;We don&#8217;t make singles, we make albums,&#8221; says guitarist Angus Young &#8212; and &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/10\/24\/acdc-a-blockbuster-despite-downloads\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;AC\/DC a blockbuster despite downloads&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}