Pulp Friction

Free music becomes paper-thin

Newspapers are failing over themselves to give you free music, your local record store, however, isn’t quite so keen:

* Prince finally delivered on his much-maligned free album give-away. His new album Planet Earth was offered as a free cover mount with the Mail On Sunday on 15 July prior to the album’s official release date. The newspaper is said to have invested £750,000 on manufacturing and marketing the freebie. “We are spending more than any record company would spend on a launch”, said the newspaper’s MD Stephen Miron.

* The Evening Standard is giving away 3,000 iTunes downloads in conjunction with the iTunes festival. The festival runs for the month of July at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and will feature artists including Amy Winehouse, Groove Armada, Crowded House and The View. 1,000 readers each day will win 3 free songs from iTunes.

* The Guardian and Intel teamed up recently on SecondFest, a free virtual festival within Second-life. Hadouken!, one of the acts who performed, had this to say of the virtual festival experience: “Unless they invent virtual mud, virtual tents, virtual drunkenness and virtual sex, I don’t think it’s the future”.

If the Crimea can give away their album why can’t Prince. If Coke can give away 2B downloads why can’t the Evening Standard. Newspapers seem to have become an easy target for double standards. How dare print cross territorial boundaries and steal retail music stores revenue.

Lets not kid ourselves here, a new Prince release would have sunk without trace if released in the old fashioned way. Change is going to hurt aspects of the music industry, that is inevitable, but in order to extract any revenue in a brave new world new partnerships are going to have to be formed. Prince makes money. The Mail on Sunday makes money (3M copies sold). The consumer is happy. Not an entirely unsatisfactory result.

So what of the widely reported notion that campaigns like this will reduce high st retail to dust? Well, quite frankly it’s already crumbling. Standing Canute like against a tidal wave of innovative revenue models isn’t the answer here. As HMV found out when it backtracked and decided to stock the very paper it had previously criticised.

Let me know when I can get digital copies of every Beatles track free with The Beano.

www.3121.com

www.itunesfestival.com

www.guardian.co.uk/secondfest