Buy One Album, Get Hits by 18 Top Artists

On a recent tally of the nation’s best-selling albums, big-name collections from stars such as Britney Spears, Jay-Z and Garbage all slid down the list to make way for a hot new album featuring . . . Britney Spears, Jay-Z and Garbage?

A high-powered hit compilation that debuted on Aug. 4 at No. 3 on the U.S. album chart has a mouthful for a title--it’s “Now That’s What I Call Music, Vol. 2”--and may signal some eye-opening changes for the American pop scene.

Defying the tradition of compilations that bundle oldies or stale one-hit wonders, the Now series is an experiment that brings together hits from recent months and features marquee artists such as U2, Sheryl Crow and the Backstreet Boys.

The idea has been a huge hit in Britain since the early ‘80s but has, until now, been resisted by U.S. music powers leery of allowing a hit from an album they’re still trying to sell to be made available elsewhere.

“This is unexplored territory in America,” says Ray Cooper, co-president of Virgin Records’ U.S. operation, which is leading the Now project. “This is new here, and I think it has only positive things ahead of it.”

That remains to be seen. First, skeptical officials at U.S. record labels must be persuaded that an omnibus of recent hits does not cannibalize sales of the individual artists’ albums.

“The question, too, is whether this is artist development or not,” said an official at a major label that was not among the three companies contributing to the new album. The official, who asked not to be identified, added that “taking a hit off of an album is not the ideal way to get people to hear the artist’s music fully.”

A Music Staple in English Stores

In Britain, the series has become a staple of the music scene, arriving in stores as often as three times a year with surveys of the most recent chart-topping songs. Forty-three Now collections have been issued there, and total sales for the series surpass a jolting 36 million copies.

Now also arrives as other styles of music compilations are thriving, from all-star collections from No Limit and other rap labels to film soundtracks, which have more than doubled their market share since 1996.

Can the Now formula’s success story cross the Atlantic?

In Britain, singles dominate the market and songs rarely linger long on the charts--so the songs featured on the Now collections are less viable on their own when the albums come out. But the U.S. market is geared toward album sales, and it’s not unusual for hit songs to linger on the charts for months.

So why would Jive Records allow its two biggest stars, Spears and the Backstreet Boys, to contribute songs to the collection while those tracks appear on albums still in the Top 10? And why would Universal Music Group give songs by Jay-Z, 98 Degrees and Sublime?

“The idea that it cuts into [album] sales or hurts the artist--that’s not an uncommon logic,” says Bruce Resnikoff, president of Universal Music Enterprises. “But it’s a faulty logic.”

Resnikoff points to the intense television ad campaign for the new Now collection. For four weeks before the album’s July 27 release, ads tailored to different demographic groups hyped it on MTV, VH1, BET and other cable networks.

Each ad also mentioned all 18 of the album’s artists while playing their songs, Virgin’s Cooper said. “On radio you might hear the song but not the name of the singer, and naming the artist the way we do is artist development,” he said.

Spears’ Sales Fell With Compilation Debut

Still, artists with a single signature hit would seem to be risking their major selling draw by packaging it with other artists’ top tunes. Take Spears, for example: The teen queen’s “ . . . Baby One More Time” is perhaps the biggest song of the year--and the first one heard on the Now album and in most of its ads. Is that why sales of the singer’s album dipped when the Now compilation hit stores?

“That’s probably exactly what happened,” says Jonathan First, president of the American branch of Edel Records, a European company that has done many Now-like compilations. “But only briefly. Overall it will help Britney because it only increases her exposure and gets her name out there.”

The new Now album has sold a strong 436,000 copies in three weeks, a pace that would suggest it will eventually surpass the impressive 1.7 million copies sold so far of the first U.S. volume, released late last year.

The success of that first volume--which featured the Spice Girls, Lenny Kravitz and Hanson--paved the way for the second collection’s stellar artists list, Cooper said. That trend will likely continue if U.S. music industry leaders become confidant that Now is a true boon to their business.

“We’ve yet to prove this exhaustively, but [our research] points out that this exposure for the artists does not bastardize their individual sales, it in fact enhances it,” Cooper said. “We’ll soon be able to see.”

Cooper said the goal for the series is for a new Now collection to hit stores every six months, giving fans an instant time capsule of the top music of the day.

“Pop music is the soundtrack to each new generation’s life,” he said, “and to be able to get the biggest songs over the course of a few months or a year in one spot, that can mean a lot to them.”

That same view from a slightly more cynical angle occurred to retailer Gary Arnold, a vice president of the Best Buy chain.

“This is music that fans can get and ride along to and enjoy a bunch of their favorites,” he said, “which they have been doing for years on their own by making tapes.

“This is a way to make and sell it to them instead of having them manufacture it on their own.”