It was supposed to be Groupon.<\/p>\n
The "Wall Street Journal" quotes an insider who says that the iTunes Store and Amazon combined moved 250-350,000 copies of the album.\u00c2\u00a0 And that’s just piss poor.\u00c2\u00a0 Especially in a country of 300 million.<\/p>\n
Bottom line…<\/p>\n
Amazon could not get the word out.<\/p>\n
Record labels pray at the altar of radio and Wal-Mart.\u00c2\u00a0 But the new kingpins are Apple and Groupon.\u00c2\u00a0 The latter have got mindshare, Amazon does not.\u00c2\u00a0 In other words, no matter how good a deal Amazon offers its customers, most people want to buy their MP3s at iTunes.\u00c2\u00a0 Where there are 15,000+ reviews of "Born This Way" to the 120 on Amazon.<\/p>\n
People don’t trust Amazon.\u00c2\u00a0 Not when it comes to digital delivery of music.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve got to download an additional piece of software and…\u00c2\u00a0 With iTunes, it just works.\u00c2\u00a0 This is why Sony is in the dumper, their stuff doesn’t just work.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s all about software and elegance and consumer trust.\u00c2\u00a0 The public trusts Apple.\u00c2\u00a0 And it doesn’t matter if someone does it better, until word gets out and people trust the new entity, Apple is king.<\/p>\n
And Amazon was unprepared, they had a digital glitch, pissing off those who did try to get the 99 cent deal.\u00c2\u00a0 They lost all that money on wholesale, and didn’t get the desired result.<\/p>\n
But unlike independent music retailers, Amazon can afford it.<\/p>\n
And retailers and artists alike are complaining that this promotion devalues music.<\/p>\n
And Interscope\/Universal smiles all the way to the bank, watching as Amazon pays them wholesale and takes the hit itself.<\/p>\n
WRONG!<\/p>\n
Interscope is thinking too small.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody in this business is thinking too small.<\/p>\n
What’s GaGa’s shelf life?\u00c2\u00a0 One can argue it’s very brief, that this may be it.\u00c2\u00a0 The shock factor has worn off and reviews are not so hot.\u00c2\u00a0 GaGa can continue to play to the media, to newspapers, television and radio, or she can play to her fans.<\/p>\n
Everyone needs a Lady GaGa album.<\/p>\n
Start there.\u00c2\u00a0 Think about that.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
How do you get them to care?<\/p>\n
Certainly not by suing them.<\/p>\n
The challenge is not eviscerating piracy, but getting people to listen.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s the price of time?<\/p>\n
I’d say a buck is pretty accurate.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, hard core fans are gonna get a deal.\u00c2\u00a0 But what about all those who don’t care?\u00c2\u00a0 How can you create a mania to the point where MILLIONS of people will check out your music instantly?\u00c2\u00a0 And if they listen, they might like it!<\/p>\n
The recording is just the beginning.<\/p>\n
Let’s say you sell 20 million.\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s say 10 million people just don’t care and delete the files.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
In other words, music is now a sideshow.\u00c2\u00a0 How can we make it the main event?<\/p>\n
By playing to masses of people, directly.\u00c2\u00a0 Cutting out the middleman.\u00c2\u00a0 Making it cheap and easy.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, Interscope is not limited to recorded music revenue with GaGa, they’ve got a 360 deal, who was so shortsighted here?\u00c2\u00a0 If the deal had been on Groupon, the Internet would have been on fire!\u00c2\u00a0 Groupon is today’s GaGa.\u00c2\u00a0 Tomorrow?\u00c2\u00a0 Who knows!\u00c2\u00a0 If you offer a deal on Groupon everybody knows.\u00c2\u00a0 If you offer a deal on Amazon, almost no one does.<\/p>\n
I’d say it’s about volume, but it’s more about attention.\u00c2\u00a0 By charging bupkes, you can get everybody’s attention, you can get everybody to listen, you can get everybody talking.\u00c2\u00a0 This is better than any paid advertising, any marketing.\u00c2\u00a0 You hook your star to the Internet powerhouse and you let the PUBLIC do the work!<\/p>\n
But no one at Interscope seems to know this.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re hanging on desperately to an old paradigm.<\/p>\n
What’s the biggest hit of the year?\u00c2\u00a0 Come on, it’s EASY!<\/p>\n
Rebecca Black’s "Friday".\u00c2\u00a0 Despite no radio airplay, she got over a hundred million YouTube views and EVERYBODY know who she is.\u00c2\u00a0 More people know who Rebecca Black is than Rihanna.<\/p>\n
And it’s all about YouTube.<\/p>\n
You can play the track ad infinitum on radio.\u00c2\u00a0 But some of us are never gonna listen to the radio.\u00c2\u00a0 But create something that goes viral online and WE’RE ALL GONNA SEE IT!<\/p>\n
Amazon’s promotion never went viral.<\/p>\n
But it was the right idea.<\/p>\n
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.\u00c2\u00a0 If no one hears it, it’s WORTHLESS!\u00c2\u00a0 That’s the value of unheard music, NOTHING!\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 If it’s good, they’ll react.\u00c2\u00a0 If it’s bad, no harm, no fail.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The problem is you.<\/p>\n
Stevie Nicks goes on "Dancing With The Stars"?\u00c2\u00a0 HUH?\u00c2\u00a0 What, is it 1986?\u00c2\u00a0 That show is not about music and she wasn’t good either.\u00c2\u00a0 What Stevie Nicks needed to do was reach her fans.\u00c2\u00a0 She doesn’t even have their e-mail addresses, she doesn’t even know who they are, and that’s criminal.<\/p>\n
Major labels have no idea who their customers are.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the fans, plain and simple.\u00c2\u00a0 Think how you can build a fan base.\u00c2\u00a0 How can you convince someone to cough up his time, the most valuable resource on the planet.\u00c2\u00a0 If people like you, they’ll give you all their money.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, so many teens and twentysomethings buy vinyl albums not to play, they don’t even have turntables, but to display!<\/p>\n
That’s dedication.<\/p>\n
GaGa may have the shelf life of a fig newton.\u00c2\u00a0 Better to get all the money today than to focus on tomorrow.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, a great day would be when all sales were completed in a WEEK!\u00c2\u00a0 Because if everybody bought it then, there’d be no reason to sell it thereafter!\u00c2\u00a0 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!<\/p>\n
The Amazon 99 cent deal was a fantastic idea.<\/p>\n
But the execution was flawed.<\/p>\n
But this is not the past, this is the future.<\/p>\n
This is how Amazon made inroads in digital books.\u00c2\u00a0 By charging less, getting more people to buy more books because they knew they were getting a deal.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s how they got digital book sales to eclipse physical sales.\u00c2\u00a0 The publishers stupidly raised the prices.\u00c2\u00a0 And refuse to pay authors much.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
And an author can’t even go on tour.\u00c2\u00a0 People don’t want t-shirts.<\/p>\n
Maybe they eventually will, but in the music business they already do.<\/p>\n
Amazon can afford to lose money.<\/p>\n
But the music business cannot.<\/p>\n
It’s time to enter the twenty first century.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s time to lower prices and get the word out.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s time to stop carping about anemic sales and start using modern techniques to sell more music to EVERYBODY!<\/p>\n
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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.\u00c2\u00a0 And that’s just piss poor.\u00c2\u00a0 Especially in a country of 300 million. Bottom line… Amazon could not get the word out. Record labels pray at the altar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-15N","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4204,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4203\/revisions\/4204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}