An article on the BBC website poses the question;
are free CDs killing music?
Yesterday, the Mail on Sunday gave away copies of Prince's latest album, "Planet Earth." The album is also being given away for free to those attending his concerts at the 20,00 capacity O2 arena, where 21 nights have been fully sold out.
As a result of the giveaway, Sony BMG (the album's distributors) have withdrawn the CD's UK release, scheduled for the following Monday. This means that for fans in the UK not attending the O2 concerts, buying the Mail on Sunday will be the only (legal) way to get a copy of the album.
This isn't the first time Prince has challenged the usual practices of the music industry. In 1995, he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol in protest at his record company's ownership of his name as a trademark— he reverted to the name "Prince" when his contract with Warner-Chappel expired. On his 2004 Musicology tour, he also gave away free copies of his Musicology album at gigs. In June 2006, Prince was honored with a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his "visionary" use of the Internet that included becoming the first major artist to release an entire album—1997's Crystal Ball—exclusively on the Web. Orders for Crystal Ball had been placed on Prince's then-website, 1800newfunk.com, but the album was also released shortly to traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.
Although free CDs are a regular appearance as giveaways with magazines and newspapers (usually compilations, although occasionally "classic albums"), this release marks the first time a brand new release has been given away as a covermounted CD. In the
BBC article Kim Bayley, director general of the Entertainment Retailers Association, says this marks a new low.
"It devalues the music and the losers will be new artists who are trying to come through who won't have any support from recording companies because established artists are chucking out their music for free. Consumers only have so much listening time in the week and if they receive the new album from Prince then they don't need to buy new music and will spend their money on something else."
Bayley's position seems slightly bizarre to me; as though people don't budget their
spending on music, but will decide that if they've acquired a free CD that they will use up their weekly budget of
listening time, won't be able to listen to anything else that week, and therefore won't buy any more records. (It certainly seems odd, when you consider the perpetual "3 for 2" or "3 for £15" offers in high street record shops.) It will be interesting to see how the sales figures for Prince's other albums will change over the next week or two- will the release act as a call to action for people to go out and buy more of Prince's records?
To put this into perspective, the largest library in the world is the United States Library of Congress, with more than 134 million items, including 20 million catalogued books, 60 million manuscripts, 4.8 million maps and 12.5 million photographs. It's estimated that the text held in the library (ignoring all the maps, photographs and illustrations) would constitute around 20 terabytes of information.