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So, Just How Successful Was That Original Prince CD Giveaway?

Philip Stone July 24, 2007
The figures are in from last week’s UK Mail on Sunday giveaway of Prince’s new CD, Planet Earth, and circulation on that day was up a whopping 600,000, a huge financial and promotional success for Prince, but also for the newspaper? All depends how advertisers will look at the circulation numbers and how many of those extra 600,000 sales stick.

PrinceIn the UK the ABC that reports the official circulation figures allows newspapers to get away with such gimmicks. So even if 600,000 kids paid their £1.40 ($2.80, €2) just to get the CD and they then threw away the newspaper without even looking at it then as far as the ABC is concerned those are all legitimate readership sales, and those are the kind of numbers that the newspaper will report to its advertisers.

It’s a bit like the sweeps periods in the US when network TV puts on its best programming during the ratings period so they can base their advertising results on how well they did, even if that programming has little to do with normal schedules.

According to British media one thing is for sure -- the music industry is studying the CD giveaway with great interest. Should deals be done with other newspapers? Are CD sales dead and artists now should use CDs to promote their concert tours? As one wag said, “You’ll note Prince didn’t give away concert tickets!”

The main question for newspapers is whether those higher sales translate into higher readership? Will newspaper advertisers buy into the higher number? The Guardian quotes Dan Pimm, press head at Universal McCann, saying, “It is still short termism but on a much larger scale. They are trying to bring in new readers. To be honest the cynics in the industry will say that people are just buying it for Prince and chucking the Mail on Sunday away. For that (promotion) to be a success there needs to be an uplift over the next five or six weeks. It’s no good for us having a one-hit wonder.”

But for Prince the “one-hit wonder” has done wonders for his bank account. Industry sources say that Prince collected in license fees revenue that would have equated to about 400,000 sales of the CD in British shops. Compare that to the sales for his last UK release, 3121, that sold only 80,000 copies and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure how well he did this time around

But not only that, his people cleverly scheduled the giveaway to coincide with the big push to sell Prince’s 21 concerts he is giving in London at the end of August and into September. That publicity has done its trick! Media reports say that at least 18 of the shows are already sold out in the 20,000 seat arena. Various media mathematicians have figured out that if all the concerts sell out, as seems likely now, than Prince will gross between £13 million - £15 million ($26 million-$30 million, €19 million-€22 million) and that’s not even taking into account all the merchandise that will get sold at the concerts, too (each attendee will receive, however, a free copy of the CD).

With numbers like that how can the music industry not sit up and take notice? UK retail music sales have suffered to the extent that such retailers as Tower Records and Fopp have closed stores.

For The Mail on Sunday, however, if it did get some of those 600,000 additional buyers to actually buy the newspaper (and that was worth some £840,000 [$1.7 million, €1.25 million] in additional circulation revenue) and if some of those additional readers like what they saw then the £1.25 million ($2.5 million, €1.80 million) that the newspaper spent on the entire promotion may have been cheap at the price.

The Mail on Sunday has been very successful in basically maintaining its client based of older conservative, mainly women, readers over the years as other newspapers have seen circulation whittle away. If the newspaper is able now to persuade the young readers, via giveaways that appeal to their age group, that this could be a read for them then it opens up a brand new additional readership (assuming the existing readership sticks around if newspaper is able to walk the line and produce a product of interest to young and older).

That strategy has not been lost on other newspapers and there are media reports that several newspapers have been approached by other groups looking to copy Prince’s success.

Experience has shown the first time something like this is tried usually gets the best results, and then as others get onto the bandwagon the novelty wears off. Be that as it may, Prince made a bundle from this, if the Mail on Sunday can get some of those additional 600,000 buyers to stick, then perhaps this turns out to be a win-win for all – except that is, those people whose business it is to sell CDs.