wax&wires

Apple And The Big 4 Look For Ways To Resurrect The Full Album

The Financial Times is reporting that Apple and the big four record labels are looking for ways to up the number of digital album sales. The plan is to bundle a new interactive digital booklet containing sleeve notes, interactive features, exclusive content, and videos with the full album downloads to increase buyer incentive to purchase the full album instead of opting for the much more popular singles-only option.The exclusive content would also be accessible outside of the iTunes program itself.

The project has a codename of “Cocktail,” and will reportedly launch this upcoming September; right around the time Apple plans to release a tablet touch-screen computer with 3G connectivity.

We’ve talked at length about the future of the album, different artists even abandoning the album in favor of singles-only releases (see the Barcelona segment of wwtv #001). We’ve discussed at nauseum ways to create incentive for fans to buy your album, or larger packages based around your music.

What you need to realize, is that you’re no longer selling your music. Like it or not, your music is free. You might not have priced it as such, or want it to be so, but the reality of it is (especiall for the big 4) all of your music is available somewhere for free. What you need to do now, is figure out how to monetize and capitalize on the exposure that your free music has given you. You’re selling an experience around the music, since the music itself isn’t going to pay your rent. Shift back to classic marketting. Shick and Gillette will be happy to give you a free razor, because they know that you’ll buy razor blades from them in the future. Microsoft is happy to take a loss on the XBOX 360 console itself, to sell you video games and downloadable content in the future.

The razor blade still has to be good. The video games still have to be stellar. The XBOX still has to work. So don’t think you can give out terrible music and sell your would-be fans an ugly sleeveless acid wash t-shirt. Your music still needs to be good, along with your bonus content, but think beyond your music as the thing that will earn you money. It might be the catalyst that drives your production, but it is not the bread-winner.

What are your video games? What are your razor blades? What are you offering people to create in them a DESIRE to purchase your goods?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 4:02 pm. It is filed under wax and tagged with apple, itunes, majors, marketing, promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.