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…

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.

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…

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?”

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.