It was supposed to be Groupon.

The "Wall Street Journal" quotes an insider who says that the iTunes Store and Amazon combined moved 250-350,000 copies of the album.  And that’s just piss poor.  Especially in a country of 300 million.

Bottom line…

Amazon could not get the word out.

Record labels pray at the altar of radio and Wal-Mart.  But the new kingpins are Apple and Groupon.  The latter have got mindshare, Amazon does not.  In other words, no matter how good a deal Amazon offers its customers, most people want to buy their MP3s at iTunes.  Where there are 15,000+ reviews of "Born This Way" to the 120 on Amazon.

People don’t trust Amazon.  Not when it comes to digital delivery of music.  I’ve got to download an additional piece of software and…  With iTunes, it just works.  This is why Sony is in the dumper, their stuff doesn’t just work.  It’s all about software and elegance and consumer trust.  The public trusts Apple.  And it doesn’t matter if someone does it better, until word gets out and people trust the new entity, Apple is king.

And Amazon was unprepared, they had a digital glitch, pissing off those who did try to get the 99 cent deal.  They lost all that money on wholesale, and didn’t get the desired result.

But unlike independent music retailers, Amazon can afford it.

And retailers and artists alike are complaining that this promotion devalues music.

And Interscope/Universal smiles all the way to the bank, watching as Amazon pays them wholesale and takes the hit itself.

WRONG!

Interscope is thinking too small.  Everybody in this business is thinking too small.

What’s GaGa’s shelf life?  One can argue it’s very brief, that this may be it.  The shock factor has worn off and reviews are not so hot.  GaGa can continue to play to the media, to newspapers, television and radio, or she can play to her fans.

Everyone needs a Lady GaGa album.

Start there.  Think about that.

In a world where obscurity is your enemy, where we swoon if an album sells one million copies in a country of three hundred million, it appears that most people don’t care.

How do you get them to care?

Certainly not by suing them.

The challenge is not eviscerating piracy, but getting people to listen.  What’s the price of time?

I’d say a buck is pretty accurate.  Sure, hard core fans are gonna get a deal.  But what about all those who don’t care?  How can you create a mania to the point where MILLIONS of people will check out your music instantly?  And if they listen, they might like it!

The recording is just the beginning.

Let’s say you sell 20 million.  Let’s say 10 million people just don’t care and delete the files.  But the remaining mass is much larger than you can reach under the old paradigm, and these people will buy concert tickets and t-shirts and the fact that everybody’s got the music will make it a point of discussion.

In other words, music is now a sideshow.  How can we make it the main event?

By playing to masses of people, directly.  Cutting out the middleman.  Making it cheap and easy.

Furthermore, Interscope is not limited to recorded music revenue with GaGa, they’ve got a 360 deal, who was so shortsighted here?  If the deal had been on Groupon, the Internet would have been on fire!  Groupon is today’s GaGa.  Tomorrow?  Who knows!  If you offer a deal on Groupon everybody knows.  If you offer a deal on Amazon, almost no one does.

I’d say it’s about volume, but it’s more about attention.  By charging bupkes, you can get everybody’s attention, you can get everybody to listen, you can get everybody talking.  This is better than any paid advertising, any marketing.  You hook your star to the Internet powerhouse and you let the PUBLIC do the work!

But no one at Interscope seems to know this.  They’re hanging on desperately to an old paradigm.

What’s the biggest hit of the year?  Come on, it’s EASY!

Rebecca Black’s "Friday".  Despite no radio airplay, she got over a hundred million YouTube views and EVERYBODY know who she is.  More people know who Rebecca Black is than Rihanna.

And it’s all about YouTube.

You can play the track ad infinitum on radio.  But some of us are never gonna listen to the radio.  But create something that goes viral online and WE’RE ALL GONNA SEE IT!

Amazon’s promotion never went viral.

But it was the right idea.

I don’t care how much it cost you to make your record, how long you practiced, how many years you’ve been in the business.  If no one hears it, it’s WORTHLESS!  That’s the value of unheard music, NOTHING!  Stop complaining that you’re underpaid and deserve more and start thinking about how you can reach more people and get them to listen to your music.  If it’s good, they’ll react.  If it’s bad, no harm, no fail.  But instead you’d rather complain the system is stacked against you, that you can’t get on the radio, that you can’t get paid.

The problem is you.

Stevie Nicks goes on "Dancing With The Stars"?  HUH?  What, is it 1986?  That show is not about music and she wasn’t good either.  What Stevie Nicks needed to do was reach her fans.  She doesn’t even have their e-mail addresses, she doesn’t even know who they are, and that’s criminal.

Major labels have no idea who their customers are.  It’s the fans, plain and simple.  Think how you can build a fan base.  How can you convince someone to cough up his time, the most valuable resource on the planet.  If people like you, they’ll give you all their money.  Hell, so many teens and twentysomethings buy vinyl albums not to play, they don’t even have turntables, but to display!

That’s dedication.

GaGa may have the shelf life of a fig newton.  Better to get all the money today than to focus on tomorrow.  Hell, a great day would be when all sales were completed in a WEEK!  Because if everybody bought it then, there’d be no reason to sell it thereafter!  It wouldn’t be about radio spoonfeeding tracks, to keep the album alive, it would be about the artist playing live to satiate their fans and then going back into the studio and making more music!

The Amazon 99 cent deal was a fantastic idea.

But the execution was flawed.

But this is not the past, this is the future.

This is how Amazon made inroads in digital books.  By charging less, getting more people to buy more books because they knew they were getting a deal.  That’s how they got digital book sales to eclipse physical sales.  The publishers stupidly raised the prices.  And refuse to pay authors much.  So now both the famous and the infamous, the known and the unknown, are publishing directly on Amazon and charging a tiny amount and keeping all the profit.

And an author can’t even go on tour.  People don’t want t-shirts.

Maybe they eventually will, but in the music business they already do.

Amazon can afford to lose money.

But the music business cannot.

It’s time to enter the twenty first century.  It’s time to lower prices and get the word out.  It’s time to stop carping about anemic sales and start using modern techniques to sell more music to EVERYBODY!