A Shrewd Marketing Ploy By Prince, The Artist Who Formerly Sold His CDs In Stores But Now Has Given Away His Latest With A UK Sunday Newspaper, Has Music Retailers Raging Purple
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Philip Stone July 17, 2007

For Prince, the pop musician from Minneapolis, it was marketing bordering on the genius that has UK CD retailers furious but got the singer untold millions of $€£ in free promotion for his European concert tour. For The Mail on Sunday newspaper it was a marketing gem that probably cost around £500,000 ($1 million) and boosted its circulation by some 500,000 on the day. So, was it a win-win to give away Prince’s new Plant Earth CD and not sell it in the shops? For Prince, absolutely, For the Mail on Sunday the jury is still out.

It was Prince’s management that approached The Mail on Sunday with a novel marketing ploy. The artist is holding 21 concerts in London at the end of August and into September. He’s coming out with a new Planet Earth 10-track CD in July to precede the concerts. Instead of selling the album retail, why doesn’t the Mail on Sunday buy up the rights to distribute it for free beforehand?  Prince loses the retail sales but gets about £500,000 ($1 million, €730,000) from the newspaper in royalty and license fees. That has to be a great deal since the British Retail CD market in total moves less than that many CDs in a single week

The newspaper in turn will probably have to spend the same amount again to produce and promote the cover mount. In addition Prince will even give away the branded Mail on Sunday CD at his 21 London concerts to everyone attending.

Now, this was uncharted territory. UK newspapers fall over themselves giving away CDs, DVDs, wall charts and the like all in a quest to boost circulation. But usually the CDs are compilation albums and the like – not too much competition with the music retailers who all the same despise the promotions.  But this was a brand new album, all by one artist and it hadn’t even entered the retail shops yet. This CD had to have a value of at least £10 ($20, €14.60) and surely music lovers would snap up the Mail on Sunday; surely, therefore, the advertisers would be rushing to place their ads in the paper, and surely the newspaper’s gain would be the music retailers’ loss.

And the Mail on Sunday went for it. It has spent its £500,000 ($1 million, €730,000) and the question now becomes whether it, and its advertisers, got its money worth. There’s no question the newspaper put on extra sales – the numbers are not in as this is written but the paper was looking for its usual 2.3 million circulation to be closer to 3 million. But that doesn’t mean those people buying the newspaper for £1.40 ($2.80, €2) actually read it, or more to the point, looked at all those ads the advertisers paid top money for to be included in such a heavily promoted edition.

Indeed early indications are that many of those extra copies just went for the CDs and the newspapers discarded. A BBC presenter said that a studio guest had said she was going out to buy 20 copies of the newspaper so her son could give all those CDs away to his friends.

But that doesn’t really worry the Mail on Sunday because the official ABC circulation officials give a wink and a nod to this kind of thing and let newspapers get away with such promotional gimmicks that drive up their numbers, even if the papers are not read. Thus averaging in the approximately 3 million papers that moved on Sunday and also the 2.3 million that move each July Sunday without such a promotion, the ABC could well come out and report in August that the Mail on Sunday’s July average was around 2.4 million, and that is the figure the newspaper will present to advertisers as it sets its rates.

A big critic of CD cover mount giveaways is none other than Rupert Murdoch whose four national newspapers all do it in the UK, although admittedly they have cut back of late. Murdoch, in a November, 2005, interview opined, “I personally hate this DVD craze. The fact is the sales go up for a day, and are right back to where they were the following day… People grab it, tear the DVD off and throw away the paper. They (publishers) have got to learn. That's got to stop."

And that sounds exactly like what was happening with the Mail on Sunday. Already on eBay there are offers galore for the album but if people thought they were going to make a quick killing they’ve found out differently. With so many up for grabs on the auction site you can get it for as little as £2 so by the time the owner has paid the eBay fees there’s not much profit, if anything, to buy even a cup of coffee.

Not only that, anyone knowing their way around the Internet will quickly find that many of those Mail on Sunday CD recipients made it almost their first duty to upload the album onto the Internet. Anyone wanting the album for free globally doesn’t have to look very far. SonyBMG says it is “ridiculous” now to go ahead now with the UK sales launch July 24, but the US and Canadian launches are still set to go then. What’s the point of going forward when this album obviously now is very much in the public domain? For music companies that have been working so hard to persuade Internet users not to download unauthorized material from unlicensed sites this has to be a disaster.

For Prince, however, this a publicity coup of the highest order. His people figured they would get a hefty payment from the Mail on Sunday and there’s a further benefit from the newspaper’s big promotion push and all of the free publicity. And it really seems to have worked. Media around the world are constantly talking and writing about this -- how do you buy that type of publicity?

And it even works in promoting the European concert tour that hasn’t even arrived in the UK yet. Monday night, for instance, Prince was in concert at the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Le Temps, the leading serious newspaper in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, carried in Monday’s edition as its lead story on page 1 just below the masthead the five column headline, “How Prince controls all the marketing coups” and then page three is entirely devoted to the marketing coup with headlines such as “The agitated reign of Prince” to “A king of marketing”. And of course it gave the URL to buy tickets for the evening’s concert.

Front page and all of page 3 talking about the business of this type of marketing coup. All free publicity, better than any advertising, and this type of exposure is sure to follow the Prince European concert schedule.  Caroline Sullivan in the Guardian summed up what the giveaway with its accompanying promotion means to Prince, “Had it not been for the hype, Planet Earth would have slipped out almost unnoticed, as many of his recent albums have.”

And that leaves the UK music retailers losing sales, and they are livid. Paul Quirk, co-chairman of The Entertainment Retailers Association that represents some 90% of British music stores, said, “The Artist formerly known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores.”

But even between the music retailers there was dissension how to handle the situation with an already livid industry going just about ballistic when the HMV Group of some 400 music stores decided that although they don’t usually sell newspapers they will offer that edition of the Mail on Sunday.

“Like it or not, selling newspapers is the only way to make the Prince album available to our customers,” a store spokesman said.

If ever there should be a case history for marketing 101, this should be it.

ftm Follow Up & Comments

The music biz is goin’ through them changes - July 19, 2007
There’s no genius in saying the music business today is far and away different from what it was a generation ago, a decade ago and even 20 minutes ago. What Napster brought, simplistically, the iPod wrought asunder. When a UK newspaper slips a CD inside and its one-day circulation explodes little doubt remains....MORE