Don't worry though; John Farnham apparently releases an album this week.

album is pretty legit no lie

Wow, that's shockingly low.

australia, you used to be cool.

this was a surprisingly good album btw

Apparently Australia doesn't know what's up

jus cause album was slightly above par doesnt make this news any less disheartening.

all of what you guys have said is true.
if you guys have been into the bookshop known as 'borders' recently, you'd see that they're clearing out both thier cds and dvds for good at alarmingly low prices.
for example, i got massive attack's 'mezzanine', kyuss' 'welcome to sky valley', team sleep's 'team sleep', public enemy's 'it takes a nation of millions to hold us back', sigur ros' 'takk' and faith no more's 'the real thing' for $5 each.
i hate to be cynical, although the australian cd industry in general is flailing madly and appears to be on the way out.

edit: or the Irish charts with 800.

Apparently Australia doesn't know what's up

Just to give some perspective, over the past year or so, albums have topped the Oz charts with an average of between 8,000 & 12,000 sales. Eminem had a run of about 6 weeks where he was closer to about 15,000.

Kings of Leon should get to 5 figures next week.

Noticed that this album was like top 10 in the best selling at HMV the other day.

This article seems so random for some reason. Kind of indifferent about these guys, not bad not great.

god i had to sit through this band to see ETID once. Leave it to ETID to have generally the worst bands opening for them.

Australia has finally discovered Mediafire

3,600 copies nation wide gets to number 1??

wow, the rest of us must have been out riding our kangaroos hunting koala while the missus was at home wackin' another shrimp on the barbie n cleanin' the ute.

Australia - A nest of filthy pirates

Australia - A nest of filthy pirates

rofl. thank you for existing sir

Sexy, filthy pirates.

Australians aren't dumb enough to buy cd's for $20-$30 each. I dare say there's at least a few thousand private mail orders coming in from the states every week.

theres shit all places to buy CD's anyways around here.. and the ones that do charge ridiculous prices or they dont have anything worth buying

*sigh silly convict scene kids

In Australia, where you're paying AT LEAST (except in very rare cases ) $20-even $35 for just ONE CD (Anywhere from thirty to sixty minutes of music), most people just don't bother with CDs anymore. Especially since we have shit all music stores-all the good ones closed down about five or six years ago, what's left either has no range beyond top 40s or is ridiculously overpriced. Even the store with the biggest range/best prices (JB-HiFi where I live anyway) still doesn't sell new release/imports/metal/indie/underground music for any less than $15. I once saw an In Flames EP for $35! With five four minute songs on it! Generally speaking, it's not surprising people have turned away from the record industry in droves, especially with there being better deals with equal/near equal on online stores such as iTunes, eBay, Amazon, special imports, or just plain pirating.

Yeah, /rant.

haha thats pretty unfortunate buttkiss. is australia cool though? not gonna lie i've considered moving there myself as soon as i get out of college. i hear finance majors do pretty well there + i really want to domesticate a kangaroo and let my future child hang out in its pouch.

Ha, Australia is bloody beautiful mate. Sorry for all the colloquialisms but it's the only way I can describe it. Not too sure on the finance majors doing well (economics isn't really my field), but I can't see why not. And yes, the kangaroos are great for babysitting. Not too many in the city but if you're out in some of the more rural areas some of them practically come up and sit right next to you. If you can put up with the state of the music industry, you'll most likely love it.

Plus, aussie chicks are usually fairly hot.

Australia is pretty much the most boring place you will ever go

"Australia is pretty much the most boring place you will ever go"


What bullshit. Have you even been to Australia, man? It's far from boring. It's people like you who enforce weak stereotypes that are fucking boring.
I have to say, the music industry is going downhill everywhere. It does depress me though, that CD sales are on the downlow because I'm really all for them. Oh well, if that's the way it's gotta be, that's the way it's gotta be.

lol be more butthurt

Album sucks, chart sucks, we're all going to hell, yadda yadda

I'll get my mum the new John Farnham cd to help out and knock BMTH off too. No more 12th Man releases
isn't helping.

Considering aussie is pretty much on par with the american, and we're still paying two/three times as much for albums, not surprising people have gone 'fuck this'. They've probably all ordered it themselves online for cheaper.

John Farnham, Hey Hey It's Saturday, what's next?

Totally agree Kanga, I'd love another 12th man release right about now.

National slogan should be Bring Me the Sales.

haha

Great band and great album.

Maybe Lisa McCune and Eddie McGuire sing classic Aussie hits? Sure to be a booster for the industry.

Good album actually.

No one is going to blow $31.99 on ONE cd where they can rip it off some random torrent site plus the entire back catalog. No matter what the fuzz/Gov wants to do about it, people are going to do it. I mean, if you fork out $100+ for your broadband bill (thanks Optus), you obv feel like you paid your way so you should be able to do whatever you damn want.. rip off music, myspace stalk, download 50GB of porno etc etc ahahaha

let's not forget that now the australian dollar is about on par with the US dollar.

how many americans pay $30+ for a cd?

also, as an australian - i buy fuck all cd's here. i order them from the US and save over half my money.

So do these sales numbers include cd's, paid downloads and all that?

Nope. It's just physical sales.

BMtH are actually #4 on the digital sales this week.

at jb hifi new releases are usually $20 and you can get a lot of older ones from $10-20 but heaps are
still at $28. itunes $17 new release and older ones can be $8-14. I have to get a lot on ebay/amazon
that just aren't available or too expensive.

or many just torrent.

I guess it's the distance and import duties that hike the price

James Blunt wrote to the Times last year complaining about people killing the music industry, and therefore music itself. Shame music's so shit now. Oh, wait...

Dave, see kangaroopoo's above comment for cd prices. As for why, who knows. Our exchange rate used to be completely screwed, so that could HAVE been a reason. Retailers probably kept the prices as is just for simplicity, now that exchange rate is on parity with the USD.

As for monthly internet charges, that heavily depends on who your ISP is & where you live. There are competitive deals with decent limits for as low as $30, but some of the bigger, more reliable ISP's charge an arm & a leg for decent limits. Yes, around about triple figures.

Mostly only ever buy CDs when they're on the $10 rack at JB.

JB never have anything decent worth buying though. The last thing I got from JB was a Bowie album for $10 that I already had but was scratched as fuck. I order all my cd's from the states. Along with all my skate stuff and at least half my clothes these days. We get ripped off bad here.

i'm planning on only supporting indie bands like my chem

Uh, cost of living in Australia is pretty damn high. Particularly in the major cities. Sydney is one of the most expensive cities to live in the world.

Australia is the greatest place on Earth

when I went to France, their cds were way more expensive than here

I am fairly certain that CD's are indeed made here. So I don't think that's got anything to do with it.

Yep, we do get ripped off here on many things where the governments of the 80's & 90's (& before) did not promote competition on. Hell, going back 20 years, we basically had the one phone company. I'm with a cheap ISP because I simply couldn't afford the more established alternatives (who are still unwilling to lower their prices unless you package home & mobile phone with internet).

In many areas of the country, utilities such as electricity & gas have also only been opened up to proper competition in the last couple of years!

Eh JB has decent stuff, if you get to one of their big stores their punk and indie sections are actually pretty top notch, and those are like the only two genres anyone ever needs so its okay.

Yep, our internet speeds really are quite shite and they STILL charge triple figures for reliable service. Our limits are also split into on-peak/off-peak quotas, which I've never heard of anywhere else. And yeah, the cost of living in Sydney is crazy. I think if memory serves me right it was something like the fourth or fourteenth most expensive city to live in. I'm crap with numbers.

Yeah, but streetlight, most of those bands will sell their stuff for much cheaper over the internet.
But yeah, JB actually has good range compared to most record stores, and that being said I do find it
hard to not buy stuff when I browse.

JB in Melbourne does not have '...In Shallow Seas We Sail'.

It's a self-fulling prophecy - the retailers stop marketing cd's, drastically reduce their range and persist to charge insanely high prices for new releases, all because "the industry is collapsing", and thus sales continue to fall.

Well you have to factor in that the Australian dollar is weaker than the U.S. dollar.

On a side note, I really wish I could go to Australia

No Zippa, the two dollars are almost on par. In fact, they did reach parity for a brief moment a few days ago.

I never though Dublin would be an expensive city. Must be the Pommie in me.

JB in Melbourne does not have '...In Shallow Seas We Sail'.

Catfight On A Hotdog get more than that here.

I think you might be right Alex. Video games, consoles & other peripherals may be where it's at for them right now.

"It's a self-fulling prophecy - the retailers stop marketing cd's, drastically reduce their range and persist to charge insanely high prices for new releases, all because "the industry is collapsing", and thus sales continue to fall."

^^Great insight, man, and so true.

And DaveyBoy, those video games won't even continue to sell for much longer given the steady move towards downloadable content. eBooks may well put bookstores out of business before long as well.

Technology moves wayyyyy too fast for me.

Book stores are probably the most likely to stay competitive. I don't know anyone who enjoys eBooks.

This is true, but I wouldn't be surprised if books eventually went the way of the vinyl record.

Book piracy on the rise:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/adrianhon/100005867/your-time-is-up-publishers-book-piracy-is-about-to-arrive-on-a-massive-scale/

Interesting article, maybe I was wrong. I'm probably just living under a rock, but I really can't imagine sitting down and reading a novel from anything other than a book with paper pages.

The comments were fascinating too, I was totally unaware of this thing called e-paper. I guess the tech revolution really is here. It's only a matter of time until we can produce food with the same 'infinite' idea.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html

I know its a comedy website, but that article raises a lot of very very interesting points.

Yeah I download books like crazy. I think I've got 5+ Gb of books - mind you, they're all for uni and not fiction, but I could get them too if I wanted.

That cracked article was pretty depressing lol. I liked things the way they were a few years ago. The world's gonna go to shit now lads.

I'm with the vinyl enthusiasts-I've tried ebooks and I just can't read them. It lacks the comfort and charm of paper, I can't write in the margins or make notes like I do with paper and pencil. It just seems so impersonal.

And now I feel like a hypocrite seeing as I posess electronically-formatted music and all.

Why is Keneally your avatar? =/

Because Keneally is smokin', biatch.

"Blu-ray is probably the last physical media we'll ever see." That line in the cracked article really put it into perspective for me. The end is nigh, oh dear.

I'd buy hard copies of everything if I could afford it but I can't.

Every time she speaks I want to stick sharp objects in my eye. Repeatedly.

Why is Keneally your avatar? =/

Like Butkuiss said, she's smokin'. I'm a big fan of her work.

Fuck the State Governments, get rid of 'em all I say.

Yeah. If she'd just add in a few more blastbeats, I'm sure she'd make my top 10 of the year.

Guess what Kristina? I'm coming for you...

Final note, yeah, no one is going to fork out $30+ for one cd. Your already cashing out $100 for your broadband, and since you paid a premium, you might as well download your Keneally upskirt videos and crash BitTorrent with 70 odd downloads all at once.

kenneally super hawt, end of discussion.

Joe Tripodi agrees.

you didn't

I did.
;)

Hi Joe, want to meet up for dinner after parliament tomorrow? My shout.

Sure thing. I'm not too into these office romances, but hey, I'm not going to be around the office much longer, so what the hell. At least we won't have another chair sniffing fiasco.

Are you sure about that?

guys obviously Australias short lived metalcore scene is already fading away. time to introduce them to rockabillly..