Only 15 Minutes of Top 10 Fame?

By STEVE HOCHMAN

July 30, 1997 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Look out below!

That’s the anxious cry in the record industry these days as one album after another by star acts enters the Top 10 impressively, then descends rapidly.

In fact, no established pop, rock or R&B; act this year has been able to maintain its position in the Top 10 for long.

Not R&B; divas En Vogue, whose “EV3” debuted last month at No. 8 and was already down to No. 27 after only four weeks.

Not English electronics pioneer Depeche Mode, whose “Ultra” went from a first-week No. 5 showing to No. 28 four weeks later.

Not even Paul McCartney, who--riding the tide of the Beatles’ “Anthology” success of the last two years--made his biggest debut in years with “Flaming Pie” at No. 2, only to fall out of the Top 10 two weeks later.

It’s the latest curve for an industry already concerned about the failure of some of its biggest names to live up to expectations in recent months and the overall sluggishness of sales. After leaping from $7.5 billion in sales in 1990 to $12.3 billion in 1994, growth in the industry has been negligible for the last two years.

So are these dramatic chart descents more danger signs in a troubled industry?

Surprisingly, many executives say no. The reality of the record business is that hit albums by veteran acts have always tended to enter the charts high, then slide. What has changed is the perception of how an album should fare on the Top 200.

There is so much emphasis these days in making a big splash on the charts--including self-congratulatory ads and press releases--that the industry and pop fans have both been caught up in the chart game. The downfall is that winners suddenly look like losers when the albums start slipping. And that hurts more than just ego: Radio programmers start sensing that a record is getting cold and tend to decrease its airplay, and fans also begin to wonder whether an act has lost some luster.

“Right now there seems to be some mentality, and I don’t know where it came from, that people think of records like motion pictures,” says Mike Shalett, CEO of SoundScan, the firm that since 1991 has electronically compiled and reported the music industry’s official figures of record sales. “They’re not.”

Where a movie’s success or failure is usually determined in the first week or two of release, albums’ lives have historically been played out over a much longer term.

“It’s nice to have the publicity of a big debut, but in the long term, it’s not a big deal,” says Danny Goldberg, president of Mercury Records, the home of Hanson. “In real life, it’s eight to 10 weeks into a record’s life that you can start to get the feel of how it will do, sometimes much longer, especially with a new act like Jewel or No Doubt.”

Ironically, it was the advent of SoundScan that brought the focus on the opening week. Before SoundScan, sales reporting was slow and subject to manipulation by record companies, which believed that it was better to have a new album rising on the chart rather than starting high and falling. The new system showed the public, however, what the record executives knew all along.

“It’s always been that established artists will sell a lot the first week, mainly to hard-core fans who have been waiting and waiting for a new album,” Goldberg says. “The next weeks they are going to go down, since the biggest fans already bought it.”

But if it’s always been this way, why does it seem more dramatic now, with the great amount of turnover at the top of the charts in recent weeks?

“We are in a ‘song’ mentality rather than an ‘artist’ mentality, and that creates an environment for incredible churning and disruption of week-by-week chart numbers,” says Jeff Pollack, owner of the nation’s largest radio programming consulting firm. “It’s of the moment, and whoever is hot right now and has the hit single jumps.”

And everyone else plummets, which--lately at least--has sounded an alarm.

“There’s a whole cycle that can create a chain reaction when a record slows down,” says Bob Bell, new music buyer for the Wherehouse chain. “Radio may back off a record if they look at sales figures and see it slowing down. And if radio backs off, that’s going to have a further impact on sales.”

This season it’s been magnified by an unusually steady stream of high-profile releases providing weekly new titles in the Top 10.

“There’s been a really strong release schedule for this time of year,” says Billboard magazine charts editor Geoff Mayfield, who recently noted the quick turnover in the album Top 10 in his “Between the Bullets” column.

That, he says, may hurt individual releases as far as time in the spotlight is concerned, but overall it’s been good for business.

“There might be concern that some of these big sellers haven’t hung in,” he says. “But the good news for record stores is that if the current one doesn’t hang on, something else is right on its heels. Normally you don’t have that kind of flow this time of year.”

Both Goldberg and Shalett say, however, that even if the top of the chart looks like bad news, back in the pack you can find real signs of industry strength.

As illustration, both point to Sheryl Crow’s second album, “Sheryl Crow,” which was written off by many observers as a failure after it had a very short run in the Top 10 upon release last year. What fewer people have noticed is that it has hung on steadily in the vicinity of No. 50 ever since, with steady weekly sales of more than 20,000 copies in recent months and a total overall of 1.7 million.

“That’s a real success story that never looked like one to the people who have been writing about the business, because it wasn’t driven by a few weeks of huge sales,” Goldberg says. “The real story is the aggregate of sales over time.”