From the visionary researchers who first discovered that water is wet and bears poop in the woods comes another shocking announcement: People don’t buy albums as much as they used to. Obviously, album sales have been going downhill ever since the breakout year when music was first invented, but the headline-friendly information this time around is that no one artist’s album has gone platinum this year. This actually comes from Forbes, which notes that only one album has sold the requisite million copies in 2014, and that’s the Frozen soundtrack. Also, Forbes says the Frozen soundtrack has sold about 3.2 million, and believes “with winter coming, that number is sure to rise,” which is something we only wanted to bring up so everybody could picture Ned Stark hyping album sales.
While we assume nobody in the world will be surprised by any of this, it is a pretty noticeable downturn from last year. At this point in 2013, five albums had already gone platinum, including Jay Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail and Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience. As of right now, the two best-selling albums in 2014 are Beyoncé’s self-titled iTunes sneak-attack and Lorde’s Pure Heroine. Both of those have sold about 750,000, but they both also came out last year. That means they barely count as it is. Also, these numbers only include albums that people actually chose to buy, not albums that were forced into people’s hands when they weren’t paying attention. Sorry, U2.