What the best-selling album of all time says about baby boomers’
spending power
Sept 2, 2018 10:06 a.m. ET
They’re not the ‘Take It Easy’ generation
Michael Jackson fans worldwide are celebrating what would have been his 60th birthday this week, a testament to his enduring reign as the king of pop.
But that title took a hit this month.
Classic rockers The Eagles dethroned Jackson’s 1982 masterwork “Thriller” as the top-selling album of all time when the band’s “Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975” surpassed 38 million copies sold.
Regardless of what it says about their relative musical talents, the milestone is evidence of the awesome spending power of the generation that’s just a few years older than Jackson’s Generation X fan base: baby boomers.
‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’
Representatives for the band and its music label didn’t have an exact demographic profile of Eagles fans available, but the band formed in 1971, and it’s safe to assume that the bulk of the band’s fans are baby boomers, the group born between 1946 to 1964 and now in their mid-50s to early 70s.
Research has shown that musical taste freezes in your early 30s. That’s how old millions of boomers were when the Eagles were churning out chart-toppers like “Hotel California,” which included the immortal lines “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Most people (69%) who like similar artists of that era — including Eric Clapton, The Grateful Dead, Fleetwood Mac, and Paul McCartney — are 45 and older, said Russ Crupnick, managing partner of the research firm MusicWatch. And those fans have had ample opportunity to buy the record-setting Eagles’ greatest hits album again and again.
“The millennials may represent the future of marketing, but the future isn’t here yet,” Hubbell said. Millennials are still five to 15 years away or so away from their peak earning years. Hubbell has seen some long-established companies panic when they realize their core customers are now in their 70s and awkwardly try to pivot to selling to millennials. “That’s a wrong move,” Hubbell said. “They should be going after the people who actually have money.”
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