Psychedelic trance: Encyclopedia II - Psychedelic trance - Commercial success

Psychedelic trance - Commercial success

In recent years, sales of psychedelic trance have been falling. The decline was : -2,8% in 2001, and -8,8% in 2002. A typical album usually sells around 2,000 copies, and selling more than 5,000 copies would be considered a success. There are only a handful of artists who sold more than 20,000 copies, including Hallucinogen, Infected Mushroom, Transwave, and Astral Projection. Hallucinogen's Twisted has had the most commercial success to date, selling around 85,000 copies.

The reasons for this decline in public interest include overproduction, copyright infringement, lack of publicity and poor quality of music. In fact, the market has not grown much, however the number of new labels and artists has increased exponentially. Much of psychedelic trance is also channeled through illegal copying by sharing of music, particularly among students and streaming audio on the internet. Although this has opened up the market to newcomers, most of these fans do not have the ability to purchase music since it is not normally distributed in mainstream record stores. Finally, most labels put a lot of pressure on new artists to release albums, resulting in lower-quality work.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Commercial success", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki