Up until now, one of the music industry's worst problems has been dealing with music piracy, both physical and online. Now, the UK industry has reacted angrily with the decision by the US musician Prince to give away its new album with The Mail newspaper. The Sunday newspaper has been reported to have paid £500,000 (~US$1 million) to distribute the album.
So far, many newspapers have been giving away free CDs and DVDs with its papers to lure readers. The Mail itself has already included CDs from well known artists such as UB40, Peter Gabriel, Dolly Parton and so on. However, according to The Mail's managing director, no one has ever done this with an album before its official release, as the Planet Earth 10-track CD is not due to be released until the 24th July. As this is the artist's 24th studio album, the co-chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association sees this as an insult to all the record stores who supported Prince throughout this career.
The main thing the music industry fears now is that this could become a trend for artists, since they get a large sum upfront without the cost of marketing their music. In this case, Prince gets its lump sum, The Mail readers get a free CD album, the newspaper hopefully sells enough copies to make up for this cost, but the music industry gets little, if anything out of it. After piracy, the music industry sees this as yet another example of damaging the perceived value of music.
It is quite clever to see how Prince is able to make a large sum of money without its fans paying more than the price of the Sunday paper to get the CD. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see just how much prince would have made had it just relied on music store sales to sell its new album! As prince is due to play on 21 concert dates in London later this year, this give away will help get its music heard and thus help bring more fans into its concerts.
Thanks to Quakester2000 for letting us know about this news.
