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zphage wrote: Ghosts did $1.62 million in direct online sales in its first week, with five versions offered, including free..
I love the idea of Wal Mart (especially Wal Mart) and the other major retailers getting it in the ass but it is still early days.
I have a much bigger gripe with the stores than with the major labels.
Retail has become less about selling music than selling the space and positioning on their shop floors to the labels. Their margin is all in the add-ons that the labels pay through the nose for. It is a supermarket mentality that has done as much, if not more, than P2P to instill this idea that $10 / £10 is the "right" price for an album.
How is it that people who pay for £8 for a paperback they will read once, £10 for three drinks in a pub that are gone in ten minutes or £6 for a packet of fags yet those same people will bitch and moan about paying £12 or £15 for a record they will get hours and hours of pleasure from? 40 Silk Cut or "1969 Live" you decide where the value is in £12!
Since 1998 ish you've had families who might be spending £250 a month on internet connections, mobiles, cable tv and a trip to a Premiership game or whatever. Some of that is money they used to spend on music.
And where's the margin in a £10 cd when the store wants a 50% mark-up and all the other costs - manufacturing, marketing and mechanical royalties etc - remain more or less static? The label margin is decimated, the artist with a % based deal gets screwed (as always) and everyone else gets paid as if nothing has changed.
That's Titanic thinking and the rich always have the best lifeboats.
As for NIN. $1.63m looks like a lot of money on paper but if that's a worldwide figure then it's not so brilliant given that Year Zero sold 190,000 and With Teeth sold 280,000 in the US alone in their first week of release.
It'll be a while before we can measure the effectiveness of this with any accuracy. From here it looks like they are shortening the supply chain and getting the last big scrape from a near empty barrel rather than creating a new paradigm or whatever claims are being made for them. This release is NIN launching their lifeboat not the Santa Maria of the music industry.
As for the labels they have always put out lots of crap. Even in the so-called golden age of 67 to 77 they released loads and loads of really bad albums by mediocre acts. It's just that the more marginal acts the majors would have signed in the 70s are now all on indies or self-releasing.
What we will see a lot more of is bands and artist being sponsored to make records by corporations who want to be seen as caring and sharing and by companies who want a sexy add-on to their own product. "The new Lighthouse Family album brought to you by Innocent Smoothies" and such like with tour sponsorship thrown into the deal. Has to happen because the wider public really have been manipulated into not giving a flying fuck about the idea of buying recorded music any more.
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