But what interested me more was the back end of the release and the 500,000 online sales Amazon generated.
One of the major successes of Gaga's album was 60% of recorded sales were digital. The record industry have been treading water for at least a decade now with the introduction of digital sales and the ever changing nature of the 21st century. After years of attempting to shy away from the 'digital world' labels and artists are beginning to understand the role that album sales play in the multifaceted business that is music. Touring, merchandise, endorsments and plenty of other clever revenue generators (and publicity) are what end up funding the product 'the music'. Seemingly backwards when you think about the systematic processes of art as we know it… (which one could beg to question is it really art when one applys a systematic process?)
Anyways in attempt to re-launch their cloud-drive amazon.com got friendly with some big people at Universal and made avaliable a digital download of 'Born This Way' for 99c… yep you heard right 99c. Cloud drive isnt exactly what I thought it was (I thought it was a digital downloads site) but instead the new branch of amazon acts as an online hard drive giving you 5GB of free space to store data. One can up the data limit but this comes at a significant cost (especially when one can create endless google accounts - messy but creative!)
So basically amazon bought the album at full price and onsold it at a rediculously cheap rate in order to drive visitation to the website. Success…? Who knows! Amazon (failing to comment) lost a predicted $3million on the campaign… At the expense of record stores who predicted their sales were down by 50%... But 500,000 people now have amazon cloud-drive accounts… who may use them again? Maybe not? Who knows.
A question I am lead to ask is… What place does the 'music' play in a world of marketing, publicity and sales… ? I don’t know the answer but I thought the below from the New York Times was interesting… "Mr. Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager, said the prerelease promotional campaign for “Born This Way” had been in full swing for six months. “If you look at ‘The Fame,’ ” Mr. Carter continued, referring to Lady Gaga’s first album, “it wasn’t marketing ploys that drove the success of that album. It was the quality of the content and Gaga’s willingness to go around the world and play for the fans, do the promotion, do the TV shows, visit the radio stations and the club D.J.’s. There’s a lot more of that than there are marketing ploys.”
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