That Sound You Hear? The British Music Industry Crumbling Under The Weight Of “Planet Earth”
While Prince was collecting a giant paycheck in the Hamptons this weekend, he was also–perhaps through some sort of purple magic–singlehandedly destroying the British music industry, if you believe the London newspapers today. Across the British newsstands, nearly every paper that was not packaged with a free full-length Prince CD on Sunday decried the act as an assault on retailers and the industry as a whole. While one could question the ability of the Daily Mail‘s peers to fairly assess a marketing move by one of their competitors, the real question is “what now?”
The BBC found just the person to ring the alarm of panic: a representative from the Entertainment Retailers Assocation.
Although covermounts have for years been a major concern to the Entertainment Retailers Association, its director general Kim Bayley says this marks a new low.
“It devalues the music and the losers will be new artists who are trying to come through who won’t have any support from recording companies because established artists are chucking out their music for free.
“Consumers only have so much listening time in the week and if they receive the new album from Prince then they don’t need to buy new music and will spend their money on something else.”
Giving away something for free gives the impression it has no value, says Ms Bayley, and along with illegal downloads, they reinforce consumer expectations that music costs next to nothing.
Covermounted discs make up 10 percent of CDs pressed in the UK, and they have been a part of the periodical industry for some time, but no artist as notable as Prince had released a full-length album through the press before. However, it’s unlikely that the industry will fall merely because an artist who makes most of his money from ticket sales found a way to make money by bypassing record stores. The idea that consumers would have purchased music by new artists alongside the Prince disc–if only they had walked inside a record store–is laughable to anyone who has worked on the retail front lines and watched people ask a clerk where the new album by their baby-boomer favorite was located without taking even a glance at anything else.
The likelihood that the Planet Earth release is a one-time gimmick is high; while one British retailer closed before feeling the impact of lost Prince sales, blaming Prince for the British music industry’s financial woes is equal to blaming hip-hop mixtapes for poor sales on this side of the Atlantic.
Maybe that’s a bad example, but you get the idea.
Are free CD’s killing music? [BBC Magazine]
