Dame Vera Lynne Doubly sweet was the fact that Dame Vera held firm against a blitz of 11 re-mastered albums by those young upstarts the Beatles, all released the same week and all featuring in the Top 100, but failing to dislodge her from the top spot.
The media had a field day with all this, posing the questions: Why Vera Lynn? Why now?
Certainly, she holds a unique place in British affections. Once the Forces' Sweetheart, she’s now the entire nation’s sweetheart. And her best-known songs – We’ll Meet Again, Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart and White Cliffs of Dover had real resonance for families separated by World War II, just as they do now for the loved ones of soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yet the underlying reasons for her success are even more intriguing. The biggest of all is that the music industry, after 50 years trying to predict and satisfy the whims of fickle teenage record buyers, has done a complete U-turn.
These days, Saga-friendly music fans are the most assiduously courted by the industry, which is doing a booming trade targeting them with re-issued material, repackaged in the CD format. Why? Because we have more disposable income. We’re less affected by the credit crunch. We’re loyal to the artists and performers we like. And above all, we’re a generation that still believes in paying for music.
This just isn’t true of the young. Music is easily available to them for free through downloading, if not always within the framework of the law. The rise of downloads, usually purchased track by track than whole albums at a time, has rocked the music industry and severely affected the business of record stores.
Some commentators go even further, claiming we are seeing the end of the record album as we have known it. Disc-jockey and industry expert Paul Gambaccini observes that younger music fans prefer to cherry-pick the music they download, selecting one or two tracks from an album and buying only those. They often listen on their i-Pods or MP3 players on 'shuffle', rather than hearing individual tracks in an order decided by record companies. It’s a whole new way of consuming music.
So it makes sense for music industry executives to target the over 50s, who still believe in handing over cash for music they find appealing, and who feel comfortable with the traditional album format.
Vera Lynn is merely the most obvious example of this 're-issues' trend. And while the sales breakdowns aren’t in yet, I’d confidently bet the remarkable sales surge enjoyed by those 11 Beatles re-mastered albums was also driven by over 50 purchasers.
For over a year now, this truth has been grudgingly admitted in industry circles. Executives speak of 'The Golden Pound', which has sent artists from the distant past soaring back into the album charts: Petula Clark, the Bachelors, Bobby Vee. 'Best of' CD compilations have sold in huge numbers: 150,000 for Billy Fury, 75,000 for The Searchers, 100,000 for Joe Brown. “We were really shocked,” says the Searchers’ John McNally of the band’s new lease of life forty years on.
It seems to me there’s a pattern here: these artists all chose songs with care and recorded enough tracks of enduring quality to fill a CD. Enough veteran artists have back catalogues strong enough to form CD compilations. This is a trend that could endure. Meanwhile, isn’t it gratifying – and amusing – to see the music business pandering to a generation it had ignored for decades?