I know, I know, that headline is awesome. Your probably thinking that I have a career waiting for me at some regional newspaper if I ever decide to give up my "career" as a professional musician.
In all seriousness I'm floored by the recent move surrounding Lady Gaga's new album "Born This Way". Released on May 23rd it sold over 1.1 million copies in the first week, the first album to do this since 2005. The music market has clearly changed and for the first time ever an album (Born this Way) sold 660,000 digital downloads.
This was helped in no small part to an exclusive sale of the record by Amazon for $.99 a download! When I first heard the buzz about this I figured it was $.99 a song and that iTunes and other competitors were using their new model of $1.29 a song. I could not even imagine that it was less than one dollar for the entire record!
The New York Times, in an article by Ben Sisario, is reporting that Amazon is paying full wholesale price for the album and is taking a loss to sell it for 99 cents!
Amazon paid Interscope’s distributor, Universal, the full wholesale price for the album — between $8 and $9 — and accepted the difference as a loss, according to several people briefed on the sales arrangement, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the details. Billboard reported that Amazon’s two-day sale yielded about 440,000 digital sales; if correct, that would mean that the retailer lost more than $3 million on the promotion. (Amazon declined to comment.)
That Lady Gaga would sell her own record for essentially a tenth of what it's "worth" does not surprise me, in fact, I would almost expect a move like that from her. A dollar for an album is not quite what Radio Head did but certainly in the same league and for someone who is as keen for attention as any artist in my generation there is almost no other choice than to do something drastic in the marketing of the album... but it wasn't her!
I have no idea why Amazon would take such a loss on this one artist except that in two days Amazon had 440,000 digital sales of one album. That has to be a record. And I'm sure a boat load of those were previous iTunes customers who had not checked out how easy was to use the Amazon cloud and downloader.
I seriously doubt that Amazon will tell us the number of first time customers they got in that two day sale, but I'm willing to bet that it was worth at least $3 million in advertising.
In all seriousness I'm floored by the recent move surrounding Lady Gaga's new album "Born This Way". Released on May 23rd it sold over 1.1 million copies in the first week, the first album to do this since 2005. The music market has clearly changed and for the first time ever an album (Born this Way) sold 660,000 digital downloads.
This was helped in no small part to an exclusive sale of the record by Amazon for $.99 a download! When I first heard the buzz about this I figured it was $.99 a song and that iTunes and other competitors were using their new model of $1.29 a song. I could not even imagine that it was less than one dollar for the entire record!
The New York Times, in an article by Ben Sisario, is reporting that Amazon is paying full wholesale price for the album and is taking a loss to sell it for 99 cents!
Amazon paid Interscope’s distributor, Universal, the full wholesale price for the album — between $8 and $9 — and accepted the difference as a loss, according to several people briefed on the sales arrangement, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the details. Billboard reported that Amazon’s two-day sale yielded about 440,000 digital sales; if correct, that would mean that the retailer lost more than $3 million on the promotion. (Amazon declined to comment.)
That Lady Gaga would sell her own record for essentially a tenth of what it's "worth" does not surprise me, in fact, I would almost expect a move like that from her. A dollar for an album is not quite what Radio Head did but certainly in the same league and for someone who is as keen for attention as any artist in my generation there is almost no other choice than to do something drastic in the marketing of the album... but it wasn't her!
I have no idea why Amazon would take such a loss on this one artist except that in two days Amazon had 440,000 digital sales of one album. That has to be a record. And I'm sure a boat load of those were previous iTunes customers who had not checked out how easy was to use the Amazon cloud and downloader.
I seriously doubt that Amazon will tell us the number of first time customers they got in that two day sale, but I'm willing to bet that it was worth at least $3 million in advertising.
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