Slashdot Mirror
iTunes Sales Ban Does Increase CD Sales
Guinnessy writes "According to the New York Times, some music labels have deliberately stopped selling some new singles on online stories such as iTunes or Rhapsody while promoting songs on the radio, so that listeners will rush out to buy the CD album instead. The album appears in itunes at a later date. Not everyone seems to think this is a good idea. From the article: 'The labels are shooting themselves in the foot,' says Rhapsody's Tim Quirk. However, Ne-Yo's CD In My Own Words sold 301,000 copies using this method. Chris Brown's Run It, that was in the itunes store, sold 154,000 copies in its first week. Ne-Yo's So Sick was downloaded approximately 3.4 million times on the peer to peer networks during the week of his album release while the album Run It!"was downloaded approximately 5.3 million times in the same release period."
"If you're buying a Picasso," he continued, "you can't just buy the upper right-hand corner."
This is a weird analogy... if I buy a single song... that's not like buying the upper right hand corner of a Picasso (though with some of Picasso's work I might enjoy it more). It's just like buying a single painting... you select the one you prefer and purchase it. You don't need to buy the whole body of work that an artist produces to appreciate the artist... a song I would equate to a single painting... meanwhile an album is just multiple paintings by the same artist.
At a buck a download... wouldn't they make more off of the album than at the 8 dollars they are selling the thing at Target for? How much does it cost to produce and distribute these CD's to each of the retail chains? How many of those CD's that are produced are in fact sold? So how many just sit on the shelves forever? Or... if you don't produce enough to meet demand... how much money have you lost opportunity costs?
Digital just seems so much more efficient... and this robbing peter to pay paul is silly... yes if you only sell a track in a single medium... of course the volume will rise for that medium... but in the end are you making more money or less? (Say you sold 300,000 tracks on iTunes... cost/benefit?)
Digital uptake is just ramping... if they start doing silly things like this to make it harder for consumers to get their content... either they'll go back to piracy... or it'll stop the whole legal digital distribution before it's even had a chance to become mainstream.