Prince saves newspaper
Kenyon Farrow, one of my students at CUNY, blogs about Prince distributing 3 million copies of his next CD this weekend inside the Mail on Sunday in London. Kenyon does a great job recounting Prince’s earlier groundbreaking efforts to break from the music industry’s ways. What’s doubly interesting to me about this move is that it exploits the the one last advantage of printing a paper on atoms and delivering them: distribution.
Tags: newspapers
July 10th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
the Daily Mail “arguably the best paper in the world”(AP) is not published on Sundays. It is the Mail on Sunday.
July 10th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Thanks, Peter.
July 11th, 2007 at 8:12 am
Hi Jeff
Forgive me for not understanding this 100% but couldn’t Prince just as well have decided to release his new CD through, say the Mail on Sunday’s website? I do see the difference between the push (newspaper) and the pull (internet) mechanisms but I don’t seing the printed newspaper as necessarily having a distribution advantage over the internet.
July 11th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Jacob
First he is giving the cd away for free - no postage, no handling $0
Second you have to understand the role the Mail has in Britain. Alan Partridge quipsthat the “daily Mail is arguably the finest paper in the world” and the audience fell off their seats laughing.
When the archetypal Mail male reads “free Prince CD” he is going to be asking “william or harry?”
July 11th, 2007 at 10:15 am
Peter,
Thanks for replying to my post.
From your description of the Daily Mail segement, you are probably right in thinking the that the Daily Mail segment will prefer the physical CD over downloading the music from a website.
However, I am still not sure that I agree with Jeff’s statement that the ‘distribution’ is the advantage of the old fashioned Internet industry. I would assume that the market segment for Prince’s music still to be fairly internet savvy, although we are all getting older…
July 11th, 2007 at 10:41 am
> Prince saves newspaper
I hate to get in the way of a good ‘newspapers are dead story, but if you look at the Mail on Sunday’s circulation graph it goes up and up from 1982 to 2003, drops 200,000 from 2003-2005 and has been steady at just under 2.3 million for the past two years.
That means 1 in 21 adults read it.
July 11th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Another innovation from the man whose photo likely rests beside the dictionary definition of the same word.
Depending on the album’s content, this may be as much about wider distribution of the Green movement as it is about breakaway marketing.
Regardless, you have to hand it to the guy, who’s never had much respect for the bloated, greedy music industry, and for whom I similarly feel about *this* much sympathy…
July 11th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
[...] Wednesday July 11th 2007, 1:01 pm Filed under: Strategy, Newspapers, Television, Media, Radio Jeff Jarvis, talking about Prince’s distribution of his new CD inside the London’s Sunday Mail says: “it exploits the [...]
July 12th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
[...] Prince Re-invents Music Business Again: Distributes New CD FREE with British Newspaper - A thoughtful look of Prince CD give away on July 15th in The Mail. [via Kenyon’s teacher Jeff Jarvis] [...]