”50-Quid Bloke” – saviour of the record industry?

Monday’s Guardian newspaper had an amusing article about the importance of the older consumer to the record (CD/DVD) industry. For US readers of this blog a ‘quid’ is slang for a pound sterling and ‘bloke’ means a man – we Brits are a strange race.

According to data from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the 12-to-19 age group accounted for 16.4% of album sales in 2002, a sharp fall on 2000 (22.1%), while 40- to-49-year-olds went the other way, rising from 16.5% to 19.1%. Buyers in their 50s (14.3%) are not far behind. Soon, half of albums will be bought by people who have passed their 40th birthday. Sales of music magazines are following a similar route.
The “50-Quid Bloke“was first defined last July at the BPI's AGM. "This is the guy we've all seen in the record stores on a Friday afternoon, possibly after a drink or two, tie slightly undone, buying two CDs, a DVD and maybe a book - fifty quid's worth - and frantically computing how he's going to convince his partner that this is a really, really worthwhile investment. He is likely to be a big user of the web and probably owns an iPod and is an avid radio listener.

The “he” is very likely to be a woman. Women bought 41% of albums in 2002, up from 38% the year before.

The BPI statistics confirm a fact we should already know: "These people are baby-boomers for whom music has always been a central passion, and they have the disposable income." Gennaro Castaldo, HMV's head of press said "A long time ago we stopped defining our target audience by age, because it's more about how much music means to them. A 50- or 60-year-old is very different from maybe 10 years ago.

At long last the record companies show signs of understanding the huge changes taking place in their marketplace. A recent edition of Music Week had a piece from Brian Berg, boss of Universal Music's UMTV, saying the industry had been under-serving the 40-plus market and the opportunities were "enormous".

I liked the final sentence of the article “It seems that the 50-Quid Bloke is doing for the record companies what Diane Keaton has just done for Jack Nicholson: after decades of running after the under-30s, they are ruefully taking an interest in people of their own age.”