The Mail on Sunday has gone on sale today featuring Prince's new 10-track album and as seen to the right (showing the Irish version), the paper surely makes it eye-catching. In Ireland, recent CD album releases typically retail for €20 to €30, so even if one just buys the paper to get the disc, the paper only costs €2. What is interesting, is that going by recent reports, this paper has paid Price £500,000 (US$1 million) to give away its album, so the artist is surely not losing out. In fact, the only ones who lose out, is the middleman, i.e. the music industry.
As one of the main reasons for this paper to give away this CD is to get more readers, no track names are printed on the CD or its cover. Instead, the paper has a page about the CD towards the back with the track listing along with a little info about each track. This page also mentions about Prince's 21 nights of live music in London at the O2 Arena along with a short article about Prince's decision to authorise the paper to give away its new album.
It will be interesting to see if any other well known artists decide to make deals with the papers like Price has done here. Obviously for the music industry, this is worse than even online file sharing for them, since consumers who get the album with the paper don't need to fork out on the retail priced album, nor do they need to break the law to get the album. Finally, unlike a few past promotional albums given away, there is no DRM or other nasty copy protection surprises on the disc, so consumers who got this Prince's Planet Earth album can transfer the album to any MP3 player, a big advantage over even most online music download services.
