Headlines Don’t Sell Newspapers
Posted by goodmind on July 20th, 2007
Last Sunday Prince released his new album “Planet Earth” to much fanfare in the UK. Since it was Prince, the quality of the music was probably enough in itself to generate a certain degree of buzz. However, no one in the UK actually purchased the album. A free copy was mounted on the cover of “The Mail on Sunday,” and readers/fans responded by purchasing the periodical in near record numbers.
Sony responded by dropping their deal to distribute Planet Earth within the UK, citing the stunt as a violation of the industry’s copyright-theft/reasonable-use stance. We’re really not all that surprised that a record company would cry foul over music being circulated at no charge, through a newspaper.
If you really think about it hard enough, newspapers COULD become a wacky Napster of the future. If we consider newspapers only as a way of distributing information, then they are inefficient dinosaurs next to electronic means of dissemination. Why not take the seeming disadvantage of physical distribution and leverage it as a hyper efficient physical distribution channel?
The Prince CD is illustrative, but the same technique could apply to samples of toothpaste, snacks or virtually any physical asset. Would people be buying the news or the distributed goods paired with it? Would it matter to the ghost of Mr. Hearst? Perhaps the Bancroft family should reconsider Mr. Murdoch’s offer.
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