Forbes has announced an article on their site detailing how "grim" (literally a word they used) it is that not a single album has gone platinum this year. For a handy recap, "going platinum" is selling a million records. That is quite a few sales, not impossible, but still… it's obviously hard enough to do cause no one has done it this year.

Well, yet. We're entering the tail-end of the financial year and I guess a lot of music bidness people are banking on Christmas to get them some more dollar – it is the time of the year for gift-giving and the gift of choice, bidnessmen will have you believe, is an album. Give the gift of music this year. Blah blah blah. Blah.

But it's not just the album sales dropping, it's singles too (allegedly). The number of platinum singles this year is 60, compared to last year's 83. However, given that we're kind of nowhere near the end of the year, this – and the album news – is kind of non-news. I did get to use a picture of some actual platinum though, which looks really cool.

I would like to point out that this means basically nothing. The only people it will be actually affecting are the ones already making a lot of money from music, i.e. major labels, publicists, super-huge stars, etc. If the music bidness is in tatters with such a "grim" outlook, then music as a thing in itself is thriving. One look online will tell you that there are more people than ever now picking up a guitar and recording their own music, or downloading FruityLoops or Ableton or whatever and learning how create music.

Just because it's not a quantifiable statistic that Forbes can comment on so that semi-rich people can talk to each other dumbly about the financial side of an art form that will continue to grow exponentially with or without labels and pat-on-the-back platinum records, doesn't mean it's worthless.

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