Arcade Fire’s ‘The Suburbs’ Hits Number One on the Charts
Posted August 11th, 2010 · Artists: Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend
Arcade Fire’s third album The Suburbs officially is confirmed at number one this week from Billboard after selling 156,000 copies and barely beating out Eminem’s latest album Recovery. This marks the third independent album to hit number 1 this year, one of which was the Haiti benefit album, so really the second ‘indie-rock’ album to hit number one in 2010 (the other was Vampire Weekend’s sophomore effort Contra). This comes after Arcade Fire’s last album Neon Bible narrowly came in at number two upon its release in 2007. The Suburbs was certainly helped, however, by an aggressive promotional price of $3.99 at Amazon’s MP3 download store for the greater part of last week.
This is big news for the record industry and may be yet another nail in the coffin of the old world business model of the major labels. One of the biggest topics in the world of music nowadays is the ‘business’ model of the music industry and the indie vs major argument. Certainly an indie label can’t provide the same resources a major can in general, but again and again we are seeing that bands can survive on their own or within the indie label system, and this is another example of that. Arcade Fire is arguably the biggest band in music right now, and they have stayed with Merge Records the whole way through and they have done just as well and probably better than they would have had they signed with a major after Funeral (and I’m sure the offers were there). This is another win for bands who want to do it their way and for the music industry, another sign that the shift to a more diverse independent system is inevitable with the diversification of information about music, and the monopolositic purpose the major labels previously served isn’t really necessary anymore with the internets and the myspaces and so forth.
Anyway, this is always an interestic topic in the current music landscape for me, so go ahead and give your thoughts below on how you take this news and whether it makes a difference or not, and whether you feel that the Arcade Fires and Vampire Weekends are pioneering a system where the indies can be more on level footing with the big boys or whether they are just outliers in a sea of bands that won’t ever see their kind of mainstream success.
