America's Top Pop Star Imports
Michael Buble, Amy Winehouse and Nickelback took the U.S. by storm in 2007.
March 4, 2008— -- What's the dream of every ambitious recording artist in the world? That's easy: Making it big in America.
It's not hard to understand why. Amid all the convulsive changes wracking the music industry, one of the features of the business that remains unchanged is that the U.S. is still the largest and most important market.
Sales of recorded music in the U.S. accounted for one-third of the worldwide total in 2006, the most recent year for which full-year statistics are available, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Coming in a distant second was Japan with an 18% market share, while the United Kingdom was third with a 10% share. No other country had more than a single-digit market share.
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Not only does the U.S. boast the largest market, but strong sales in the states can also provide a vital springboard to commercial success elsewhere in the world, says Larry LeBlanc, a former Toronto correspondent for Billboard magazine who now pens a newsletter about the Canadian music industry.
"America is still the mecca of the music industry,'' LeBlanc says. "The U.S. is key to worldwide [sales]. Period."
So which foreign recording artists sold the most music in the U.S. last year? In terms of musical style, our top foreign music stars were all over the map--everything from the loud guitar sounds of Nickelback and Three Days Grace to the indie-rock stylings of Feist, the swing vocals of Michael Buble and the infectious R&B of Corinne Bailey Rae, Joss Stone and multiple Grammy Award-winner Amy Winehouse.
But if our list is an eclectic bunch in terms of musical genres, it was pretty homogeneous by national origin: All of the recording artists on the list were from Canada and Britain, no great surprise given the natural cultural affinities that those two countries share with the U.S.
To compile our list, we examined Nielsen SoundScan sales data for 2007 album sales and single-track download sales. Then we calculated their estimated U.S. recorded-music revenue based on pricing data from the NPD Group.
