I don’t know about y’all but something fishy’s going on with album sales. Take a look at pop icon Britney Spears: her newest album Britney Jean was a crazy success – compared to an Indie album pick. Compared to her old sales trends though, it bombed. A 107,000 album debut was about ten thousand short of predictions and nearly a MILLION short of her old album sales. Poor girl, maybe she shoulda worked a litter harder.

Or let’s take a peek at Lady Gaga shall we? Art Pop opened at #1 but only with album sales of a little more than 200,000; that ain’t bad but it’s just a fraction of the 1.1 million albums Born This Way moved. And these ladies aren’t the only artists to suffer weak sales – I won’t put y’all to sleep with the details, but 2013 doesn’t look pretty for artists across the board.

Might want to start saving some of that, hon…

If you’re thinking, “well 2013’s history, things’ll bounce back in 2014,” you might just be dumber than a moon rock. There’s a reason why we have a segment on The Mosh called Spotify Schmotify and not Compact Disc Schmompact Disc: we live in the age of streaming music. Even someone as new to this whole social media thing as me can see that! The thing is, It’s more clear now than it’s ever been that sales aren’t linked directly to popularity (dry your cryin’ eyes Britney), but with the boom in access to new music streaming sites, the music industry is going to have to adapt. I for one love having pretty much every song Johnny Cash ever made at my fingertips but I wonder how long I’ll  have access to ’em…for free.

Be sure to put in your two cents in the comments below!