Dolly Parton isn’t the sort of artists I’d usually blog about.  However, one of country’s legends has gone it alone with her latest record rather than working through a record company. In part this has been because she had been dropped by her record label (as recorded here).  

If Dolly has been dropped by her label, you’d think that her record sales are pretty trivial, far from it this latest album has clocked up over 50,000 sales (details here) in the first couple of weeks of release and a top twenty sales ranking. 

This isn’t the first time such a decision has been made – just look at what happened to Wilco around the time of the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album. This begs the questions how do record companies determine which artists to drop and are record labels so burdened with costs or inability that they deem a 50,000 sales as not being sufficiently profitable enough?

  A story(here) that has been showing up on the web over the last couple of days is the surprising indication that the next Elvis Costello album to be released through Lost Highway wont be available on CD.  Given that I’ve yet to see a correction to this story, can only suggest that there is some truth in it, although the decision is certainly surprising.  I would have put Elvis Costello’s fanbase demographic (horrid music-business expression, but no other easy to express) in the area of those people who would still rather have something tangible in their hands and fall into the vinyl or CD generations.

It leaves me in a puzzling situation of how to get the album as someone who likes to have something tangible in my hands.  My local music shops have abandoned vinyl, and ordering vinyl over the ‘net has not been the best experience for me with a number of occasions of the sleeve being damaged and in one case they vinyl actually having been warped.

A change from All Music’s seemingly frequent blogging of American Idol they’ve actually written a brief artist spot light blog on Matthew Ryan here.  With Matthew’s new album coming out this can only help.