James Blunt scored a huge hit in 2005 with "You're Beautiful" and now he's back with his new CD: All the Lost Souls, with a marketing twist.Warner Music (NYSE: WMG) will be offering the CD on MySpace for $9.99. They will be able to download the tracks to their iPods instantly, and also receive the CD in the mail. That sounds like a pretty good deal!
According to The Financial Times, "Mr Blunt... boasts more than 250,000 MySpace friends. Warner will attempt to piggyback on that popularity by embedding a widget on Mr Blunt's fan page powered by a technology partner, LaLa.com. The companies hope consumers will be drawn in by a seamless experience in which they can listen to an album for free as many times as they like or purchase it without ever leaving a single webpage."
This sounds like a good way for the record labels to bypass middlemen like iTunes but, at $9.99 for the downloads and the physical CD, the margins here look pretty weak. I wonder whether they would experience much of a drop-off in sales if they did away with the "CD by mail" component. How many of Mr. Blunt's fans really want CDs anyway?
But downloading, legal and illegal, has put the record industry in a tough place. If it is to survive and prosper, it will need to continue to try innovative new marketing techniques like this one.
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