http://thebrokenspeaker.com/2010/08/13/big-mac-or-arcade-fires-the-suburbs/

 

So as you may or may not know, this band Arcade Fire just released an album called The Suburbs. It managed to top the charts in Canada, the UK, and the US. What makes this significant is that a bunch of Montreal indie rockers were able to outsell Eminem. I’m sure there are more people in the world with Eminem on their iPods compared to Arcade Fire. How did they do it? Obviously they did a good job marketing and hyping the album. But Amazon’s digital store in the United States certainly helped. For the price of $3.99 you could purchase the album. Here are the numbers we know: there were 156 000 copies sold. 97, 000 of those were downloads. 6 100 were vinyl. Interestingly the vinyl sales alone would have put it at no. 67 on the Billboard chart. How many of those 97 000 digital sales are from Amazon’s cheap promotion is not known.

 

Is this devaluing music? Is it just a ploy to artificially boost numbers? Many will argue yes. I will argue on the contrary.

 

First of all lets put $3.99 into perspective. In the United States a Big Mac at McDonalds costs $3.57. Even though it may taste like it, a burger doesn’t take three years to make. So we essentially have an album available for the price of a burger. If somebody is sitting on the fence about whether or not to buy the album, that is a good price to suck you in. Even if you illegally download most of your money, $3.99 is cheap enough to steer the downloader towards a legal digital sale.

 

Merge co-founder Laura Ballance told the Los Angeles Times “Devaluing music is something that concerns me greatly,” she said. “But it’s hard to draw a hard line on it. At this point, people can download music for free if they really want to. If you’re trying to get people to buy music, people who wouldn’t otherwise, maybe that’s the way to do it. Just to make it so cheap that it tips the scale.” You can see the intent of the cheap sales. I would be curious to know how much money the band made from each of the sales as well as how that would compare to how much money they make from an album sold on iTunes or at a physical chain like HMV or Barnes & Noble.

 

It would be interesting to know if people who bought the digital copy of the album also ended up buying the physical copy. I won’t lie, I’ve illegally downloaded albums and ended up loving them then going out and buying a physical copy. If you were to spend $3.99, it wouldn’t be too big of a hit on your wallet to later buy a physical copy of the album for $12.99 or however much it costs. Really I don’t see how this move is going to hurt the band or devalue their music. It is showing that when people are presented with a legal option for cheaply acquiring albums they are willing to take it. It shows that Merge recognizes, as a label, what the current music market landscape looks like. And most importantly it provides the band an opportunity to attract a larger audience. The combination of clever marketing and cheap downloads can only help a band of their stature grow.

I do have to agree that 3.99 would be something good for the industry. I mean honestly I've had times where there were albums on amazon mp3 store for that low price (3.99) and i feel if it wasn't that low i probably wouldn't have bothered getting the album. 4 bucks is really not that bad in terms of what your losing from your wallet and honestly I feel amazing in terms of the amount of music you get.

 

For the industry with illegally downloading it only seems logical for them to make music cheaper if they want to get more profit/sales and stay alive.

 

Cheaper albums would make more people interested in buying music, and also I'd imagine would slow down illegal downloading a little at least by people getting to spend $4 for an album instead of $10, $12, $14 or however much.

For the industry with illegally downloading it only seems logical for them to make music cheaper if they want to get more profit/sales and stay alive.

 

Cheaper albums would make more people interested in buying music, and also I'd imagine would slow down illegal downloading a little at least by people getting to spend $4 for an album instead of $10, $12, $14 or however much.

 

I've always thought that. For games/movies/software too. Particularly software. They are INSANELY overpriced

I do have to agree that 3.99 would be something good for the industry.

 

Thing is, it's not. The industry don't like the major suppliers devaluing the musical product so much. And this is from record labels themselves, who I am in contact with.

depends on which "industry" we're talking about here. the music industry isnt just made up of record labels, in this day & age the kings of the music world are concert promoters and the online music giants like itunes. personally at this time i dont think whats good for record labels is necessarily good for the music industry as a whole. if $4 digital albums means the end of record labels as we know it then so be it, music will live on even thrive in some ways.

 

personally i dont ever see myself pay for digital music regardless of how cheap the prices become but i know i represent a very very small minority of modern music fans with that mentality.

 

by the way thanks for the article briggins it made for some very interesting reading during my boring accounting lecture lol.

^haha no worries. Thats the sort of stuff I write when I should be sleeping.

^^

 

well stop sleeping!!!

Here everyone gets the music from illegal sites and I understand it, we don't have itunes store or things like that and every cd costs around 20 dollars (I asked yesterday in a little music store I found and Funeral and Neon Bible cost 26 dollars each :disappointed:) so we only buy what we really like (well, I do. Most of the people I know don't buy music). Almost all the money people spend on music here is spent in concerts so I think in this context the cheap music downloads would be a great way to make people buy the songs instead of searching for free albums on the internet.

I had a Big Mac last night. :escaping3:

depends on which "industry" we're talking about here. the music industry isnt just made up of record labels, in this day & age the kings of the music world are concert promoters and the online music giants like itunes. personally at this time i dont think whats good for record labels is necessarily good for the music industry as a whole. if $4 digital albums means the end of record labels as we know it then so be it, music will live on even thrive in some ways.

 

personally i dont ever see myself pay for digital music regardless of how cheap the prices become but i know i represent a very very small minority of modern music fans with that mentality.

 

by the way thanks for the article briggins it made for some very interesting reading during my boring accounting lecture lol.

 

Well let's divide it up then. From albums being sold at this ridiculously low cost, with almost cost-prices and near zero margins, who wins? Physical manufacturers, already doomed do fate (if not for nostalgics) have the knife dug deeper, labels lose money from less profitable investments. Yes, Digital sales of the album may increase, and these lower prices may encourage legal sales over illegal file sharing. The problem is, the value of the work done by the artist is diminished, as Briggins has correctly identified, almost to the price of a Big Mac. Surely this is evidence of an exhaustion of ideas, because as economists know, starting massive price wars and offering large reductions doesn't end well for industries.

 

I don't think the introduction of $4 Albums will necessarily "end" labels, but it does diminish the return on investments. Labels nowadays have an important role in the early development of bands so that they lay the foundations for a large support base enough to reap the rewards of Gold or Platinum album sales. $4 albums provides less incentives to artists to sustain lives through the production of music, and less incentives for labels to invest in new bands and provide opportunities and finances that isn't possible with "myspace" upstart bands.

 

It's just a shame that the margin between digital and physical costs grow that much, certainly for my bank balance. But certainly I am upset that amazon is selling the record of an established international act for the price of a Big Mac. The only reason Amazon can provide it at such low cost is because Arcade Fire have a large enough fan base and are almost guaranteed to have the larger volume of sales required with lower profit margins. Another dis-incentive of this is the crowding out of the market. Yes, this may help Arcade Fire go on to sell a platinum record, but other smaller artists that don't have nearly the same volume of sales will sadly never have the opportunity to have their album sold at $4.

 

The same problem happens over here in Australia at the moment. Department stores such as Kmart sell top-50 new release CDs for $15, whereas the major CD distributor, JB Hi-Fi, sells new release for around $18-$20. This only encourages the increased sale of top 50 albums like your Gagas, Eminems and Katy Perrys, and hence the charts, radio airwaves, are crowded out because of these cheaper sales. Only a select bunch of artists win from this, but it certainly doesn't favour some of the smaller indie artists that many of us listen to, love, and support.

I hate that more unknown albums are usually $25 in JB whereas once a CD has gotten to a certain sales threshold they reduce it to $10

I hate that more unknown albums are usually $25 in JB whereas once a CD has gotten to a certain sales threshold they reduce it to $10

 

And usually once you've already have that CD too!

I usually just download the album if it's at the point where it's $10 at JB... unless I *really* like the artist... haha reverse psychology? Often though it's because the $25 ones you can't find on the interwebs.

^thats so true. You have to pay the most for the ones you can't download. Personally, I would always buy the physical release if they were a flat, $15 per album. $20-25 if there is a bonus CD or extra material maybe.

It was £3.00 on Amazon mp3 for the Monday of the release.

 

Bands make the majority of their money from touring and merc sales now, rather than with albums

Big Mac and illegal download, please.

 

The problem is that this promotes other labels to do the same thing, and once we're used to records being $4 the quicker that $4 may as well be $12 or $20, as long as there's any sort of value, even if it's a Big Mac, we'll be accustomed to seeing it as a chunk of money. No doubt of course record sales will go up, but once everyone's used to $4 for an album, 5 years later it will seem a standard price. At first you could be buying 2 or 3 albums at a time, but when $4 begins to feel like it's digging into your funds, you'll go back to illegal downloading and only shell out the 4 bucks for stuff thats special to you now (Basically what the average person is doing now). Then what? This boneheaded solution of dropping the prices ridiculously cheap could only be enforced and a big rise in sales would happen if albums dropped to one buck. Then what? You can see where I'm going with that.

 

Let's look at it this way, very simple, if other record labels were to follow suit, then record sales would have to go 3 times higher, in the entire music industry, to even make the same money. Well, initially that could possibly happen, but definitely not over a period of time, a few years, and there's no chance that the average customer will be buying 3 albums for every 1 album they would have bought at $12.

 

That's why the price of albums needs to stay above the $10 mark, because it's a worthy value and it's enough to keep labels in profit and making expensive, quality studio albums. Sure it can get excessive with the top artists, but Arcade Fire would probably be pretty happy to admit the recording of their debut album would not have had anywhere near the same production quality if it was off their own backs.

 

Now, if albums did go down to $4, and the record industry was reaching a stage of crisis, obviously they can't drop the price any lower, so they're last option is to go back up to $12? The result being after a decade or so, a musical wasteland of free, legal, internet streaming.

 

Oh and in case you're wondering, I think it's absolutely sick.

The problem with albums is that the system penalises the pre-orders, why pay £9 for the album when a couple months later it will be knocked down to £5?

 

The record industry has reached a stage of crisis, hence why they have had to drop the prices of new cds from £14 to £8, they were ripping both bands (by giving massive advances which the band had no-hope of paying off with the money the label credits their account with every sale) and customers off in the olden days

 

In a recent e-mail sent out to fans, Sufjan Stevens' label Asthmatic Kitty implored fans to consider their options when buying the singer-songwriter's forthcoming album, The Age of Adz. And maybe to avoid Amazon. (Via the Guardian.)

 

"We have it on good authority that Amazon will be selling The Age of Adz for a very low price on release date, not unlike they did with Arcade Fire's recent (and really terrific) The Suburbs," reads the letter. "We have mixed feelings about discounted pricing. Like we said, we love getting good music into the hands of good people, and when a price is low, more people buy. A low price will introduce a lot of people to Sufjan's music and to this wonderful album. For that, we're grateful. But we also feel like the work that our artists produce is worth more than a cost of a latte. We value the skill, love, and time they've put into making their records. And we feel that our work too, in promotion and distribution, is also valuable and worthwhile."

 

It continues, "That's why we personally feel that physical products like EPs should sell for around $7 and full-length CDs for around $10-12 We think digital EPs should sell for around $5 and full-length digital albums for something like $8. So you might wonder why we'd 'allow' Amazon to sell it for lower than that. There are several reasons why, but mostly? It's because we believe in you. We trust you and in your ability to make your own choice." The letter then lists several alternatives to buying from Amazon, including pre-ordering the record directly from Asthmatic Kitty or Bandcamp, which will get you a digital copy on September 28, earlier than the regular October 12 release date.

 

will anyone buy this album off Amazon??

I might.

I would still rather have a big mac than buy the arcade fire album. The best case scenario would be for me to download the last track for under £1 and then spend the rest of my change on a small fries or something.

 

That'd be better.

I would still rather have a big mac than buy the arcade fire album. The best case scenario would be for me to download the last track for under £1 and then spend the rest of my change on a small fries or something.

 

That'd be better.

 

you do realise that nobody gives a fuck about how much you hate the new arcade fire album or any other album. so could you shut up already cos im getting sick of it and im sure im not alone on that.

Big Mac and illegal download, please.

 

The problem is that this promotes other labels to do the same thing, and once we're used to records being $4 the quicker that $4 may as well be $12 or $20, as long as there's any sort of value, even if it's a Big Mac, we'll be accustomed to seeing it as a chunk of money. No doubt of course record sales will go up, but once everyone's used to $4 for an album, 5 years later it will seem a standard price. At first you could be buying 2 or 3 albums at a time, but when $4 begins to feel like it's digging into your funds, you'll go back to illegal downloading and only shell out the 4 bucks for stuff thats special to you now (Basically what the average person is doing now). Then what? This boneheaded solution of dropping the prices ridiculously cheap could only be enforced and a big rise in sales would happen if albums dropped to one buck. Then what? You can see where I'm going with that.

 

Let's look at it this way, very simple, if other record labels were to follow suit, then record sales would have to go 3 times higher, in the entire music industry, to even make the same money. Well, initially that could possibly happen, but definitely not over a period of time, a few years, and there's no chance that the average customer will be buying 3 albums for every 1 album they would have bought at $12.

 

That's why the price of albums needs to stay above the $10 mark, because it's a worthy value and it's enough to keep labels in profit and making expensive, quality studio albums. Sure it can get excessive with the top artists, but Arcade Fire would probably be pretty happy to admit the recording of their debut album would not have had anywhere near the same production quality if it was off their own backs.

 

Now, if albums did go down to $4, and the record industry was reaching a stage of crisis, obviously they can't drop the price any lower, so they're last option is to go back up to $12? The result being after a decade or so, a musical wasteland of free, legal, internet streaming.

 

Oh and in case you're wondering, I think it's absolutely sick.

 

Yeah good point. I was thinking the same thing!

I personally almost never buy digital music because I simply can't afford to buy everything I want to listen to and also because yeah, once you get used to music being free you can't go back to buying it no matter how cheap it can be (that's why I think people would still end up taking it for free even if $4 became the standart price for an album). I'm not saying I think this behaviour is the best but it's just how it is now :confused:.

However I think it's different for physical copies of albums. I can sometimes buy one if I really really want it but most of the time the prices are so expensive that it's a complete turn off even if I would love to have the album. I mean, I don't know for other countries but here everytime I want to buy an album it's around 16 to 20 € :disappointed:.

you do realise that nobody gives a fuck about how much you hate the new arcade fire album or any other album. so could you shut up already cos im getting sick of it and im sure im not alone on that.

 

:lol:

I have never said I hate it, just that it underwhelmed me alongside their previous genius. Since you bumped the thread and I had previously said that I would give the album more time then see if my opinions had changed (Briggins suggested I do so), I figured it had had enough listens to have become good.

 

Unfortunately it hasn't.

Don't take things so badly.

 

People who don't give a fuck tend not to entertain the other persons post at all but I've clearly hit a nerve. I'm sorry you are wound up but I'm only giving my opinion.

^^

 

sorry buddy just not a fan of the negativity. when the album first came out there was persistent hating of the album which didnt sit well with me. i just think that if you dont like something, just say it and move on (exceptions made for justin bieber, nickelback and keisha)

 

anyways enough of me being pissed off at nothing. i dont use amazon much. but are they doing these deals on a lot of albums?

^Yeah Amazon has been selling alot of music digitally for dirt cheap. We don't have the Amazon online store in Canada so it hasn't impacted me at all.

 

More bands should start using bandcamp. I mean as of right now the artist gets all the money.