Paper gives away Prince CDs
Around three million copies of Prince's new album, Planet Earth, have been given away with the Mail On Sunday. — The promotion is believed to be worth about £250,000 to the musician, whose hits include Purple Rain, Raspberry Beret and Money Don't Matter 2Night.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after the music industry attacked the Mail On Sunday's plan as a devaluation of the album format, the paper has gone ahead and distributed around three million copies of Planet Earth anyway — making this the largest free-CD newspaper promotion of its kind in the UK market at the time.
For Prince, the arithmetic reported at the time — a fee believed to be worth roughly £250,000, though that figure remains unconfirmed — reframes an album release as a paid sponsorship rather than a retail event, with the label and record shops cut out of the transaction entirely.
First-order effects
- UK retailers and the album's conventional distribution chain lose a flagship summer release before it ever reaches shelves, since the three-million-copy print run reaches more households than most chart-topping albums sell.
- Prince collects a flat promotional fee instead of per-unit royalties, converting his release schedule into a one-off payment whose exact value is only 'believed' to be about £250,000.
Second-order effects
- Rival artists and newspapers face immediate pressure to test the same model, because a competitor who sells access to three million readers has underwritten exposure no marketing budget at a label can match.
- Industry bodies that publicly attacked the giveaway in late June 2007 now have to decide whether to escalate against newspapers or accept that the CD's price point has been permanently anchored near zero.
Third-order effects
- If newspaper-bundled albums prove repeatable, recorded music migrates from a product sold to fans toward content licensed by media companies seeking circulation, with labels reduced to rights intermediaries.
- Artists' leverage shifts toward whoever controls their direct relationship with audiences — a dynamic that cuts both ways, as the same artist later demonstrated by aggressively policing unauthorized online distribution of his work.
The trend: Recorded music in 2007 is being repriced from a consumer purchase into a promotional subsidy, with newspapers and brands paying artists directly while the traditional label-and-retail channel is bypassed.