When bands fall off cliffs

You sell a couple million albums. You're adored. Then 90% of your fanbase deserts you – and your record label isn't far behind. Rob Fitzpatrick investigates band collapse syndrome.

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"Radio is still it," agrees Feargal Sharkey, the former Undertones singer who now heads UK Music, an umbrella organisation representing the UK's commercial music industry. "If you have no support from radio, you're finished. You can recover from this situation, but you're aware the next big thing is always more exciting than last week's big thing."

Singer-songwriter David Gray was the opposite of the next big thing when he released his White Ladder album in 2000. Gray's fourth record was expected to sell in similarly modest proportions to the previous three. But a groundswell started by the second single, Babylon, eventually drove sales over the 7m mark.

"What helped me is that I'd been making music for a while when the success came," he says over the phone from Italy, where he is on holiday with his family. "I could handle it better. But the period after the success is always very difficult. If Radio 1 or Radio 2 don't playlist your record, it has a profound impact on your sales. When the BBC decided to play Babylon, all hell broke loose, but if you don't keep that up then you end up back in the Borderline – and when you've got used to the Hammersmith Apollo, that can be very depressing."

What did that journey upwards through success feel like?

"Oh, it's amazingly exhilarating," he says with a laugh. "But success like that blows your compass completely, it's so heavy, so all-enveloping. You do begin to think that perhaps you are God's gift. I spent three years touring White Ladder, but when the festivals and the champagne and the private planes suddenly stop, when reality kicks in again, the shock is numbing."

More recently, Gray cheerfully admits, his sales figures have "drastically reduced". Where once he might sell 1m copies, he'll now sell 200,000. His latest album (the live set Lost and Found) was digitally released for its first week exclusively through Groupon. The deal-of-the-day site emailed a link to half a million subscribers – "We have a very similar demographic, apparently" – and there was around a 1.5% take up.

"That's between 5,000 and 10,000 copies sold," he says. "Is that a success or a miserable failure? I've been working a lot in America over the last few years and it's extremely hard work selling any records at all. The figures have become pitifully small. The industry is on its knees."