Music Ally

Apple has laid down the law with labels considering promoting their albums through Amazon’s MP3 Daily Deal. Amazon apparently raised Apple’s ire when it asked labels for a one-day exclusive sales window on digital albums featured in its daily promotion.

“When that happened, iTunes said ‘Enough of that shit’,” one label exec tells Billboard. Another elaborates: “Amazon is fighting a guerrilla war against iTunes, and now iTunes is getting frustrated because they work hard to set up and promote a release weeks in advance of the street date, and then lo and behold, Amazon jumps in there with this deal of the day and scrapes off some of the cream.”

The article suggests some labels have already pulled planned Amazon promotions as a result of Apple’s demands.

Former eMusic boss David Pakman has penned a blog post warning book publishers not to repeat past mistakes of the music industry when it comes to setting the prices of e-books.

The post comes as Amazon faces a battle with leading publishers, who want to charge more for e-books than the flat $9.99 it’s been charging on the store for its Kindle e-reader. Hachette and Macmillan have already announced plans to switch to an ‘agency model’ where they control the prices.

Pakman says the publishers’ arguments for charging more for e-books are all about self-interest:

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So Rage Against The Machine are going to deny X Factor winner Joe McElderry the Christmas Number One in the UK, are they? A Facebook campaign says yes, but massive discounts of the former single online suggest not.

Online download stores Tesco and Amazon are selling the MP3 of McElderry’s The Climb for £0.29 – undercutting iTunes’ price of £0.99. EDIT - as a commenter points out, the RATM single is also £0.29 on Amazon.

It’s part of a wider price war as Apple’s rivals try to seize market share in the run-up to Christmas by discounting – Tesco is also chopping the price of the Top 10 albums when bought digitally.

Interestingly, McElderry’s single isn’t streamable on Spotify, but is on we7. We wonder what the thought process is behind that decision.

UPDATE: It seems Rage Against The Machine are narrowly beating McElderry based on Sunday and Monday digital sales…

Psychobilly artist Mojo Nixon has been giving away his back catalogue on Amazon this month, and according to a report in the Wall Street Journal has racked up more than one million downloads already.

Nixon was apparently hoping to get as many as 10,000 downloads from the scheme, so it sounds like it’s exceeded expectations (just a bit). So how does he make money from it now? Presumably he’s hoping more people will come to see him live, but BigChampagne boss Eric Garland points out another benefit:

“The people-who-bought-this-also-bought aspect of Amazon is going to make this really viral within the Amazon marketplace,” he says. So once the music is back on sale again, it’ll show up more often in Amazon’s recommendation system due to all the people who downloaded it. If that’s true, it’s very interesting.

It seems Amazon UK’s £0.29 price tag on a slew of MP3 albums today was a cock-up rather than a special offer. The company has swiftly changed their prices back, indicating that the reduced pricing was a mistake.

Earlier today, we discovered that Lily Allen’s latest album was selling for 29p on the site, and further investigation revealed the latest platters by Coldplay, Metallica, Jason Mraz and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were selling at the same price point, as well as a 24-track Led Zeppelin remasters album.

We bought several, so they were working (see screenshot above – click on it for a larger version). But checking back on Amazon now, and the prices have been changed. Lily Allen is back to £7.99, Coldplay is £9.29, Led Zeppelin is £8.98, and so on.

Amazon has brought its aggressive promotional pricing to its UK MP3 Store, judging by the way it’s selling the latest Lily Allen album for £0.29 today.

The store has been offering super-cheap one-day discounts on big albums for some time in the US, using its Twitter feed to publicise them. 550,000 people follow that feed, making it a powerful promotional mechanism.

Having paid full whack for the album from Amazon when it came out, we’re a tad cheesed off, but that’s what you get for being eager, we guess. Ah well. UPDATE: also on sale at the £0.29 price point are albums from Kings of Leon, MGMT, Metallica and, best of all, a 24-track remastered Led Zeppelin best-of.

Yesterday saw Apple’s iTunes Store finally go entirely DRM-free, but that also meant the introduction of variable pricing – which in the US, means three price points for iTunes downloads: $0.69, existing price $0.99 and $1.29.

Introduced due to pressure from the major labels, variable iTunes pricing has launched at an awkward time. Only 5% of music downloads are legal according to the IFPI, and there’s a global recession, so reward that minority of digital music purchasers by… whacking 30% on the price of the most popular songs? Strange logic.

However, the labels are putting a different spin on it, with Billboard reporting that “for every one song they raise to $1.29, they will be reducing 10 songs to 69 cents”.

Which sounds great, although The Register spent a bit of time digging yesterday, and found that despite claims like this from the labels and Apple, “those bargain-basement tunes seem to be few and far between”. Even Vanilla Ice has hung onto his 99-cent track price.

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Well, it was yesterday, anyway. More evidence of Amazon’s willingness to use deep discounts to boost its MP3 Store came with the US release of U2’s No Line On The Horizon.

For one day only, Amazon sold the album for $3.99 – versus the $9.99 being charged for it on iTunes. It’s part of the company’s Daily Deal scheme – on Monday, they sold the new Prodigy album for $1.99, while Bon Iver’s new Blood Bank EP went for $0.99 last week.

The company announces the deals on its Twitter feed, which has nearly 13,000 followers at the time of writing. It’s interesting to see big albums being treated effectively as loss-leaders to try and tempt digital music purchasers away from iTunes (or, indeed, to pick up new customers).

A survey conducted by Strategy Analytics claims that 26% of UK broadband users cite Amazon as their preferred service from which to buy digital music, compared to the 23% who said iTunes. This, despite Amazon only launching its MP3 Store late last year in the UK.

“Amazon is still some distance behind Apple’s iTunes when it comes to actual market share, but our survey results suggest that Amazon’s dominance and brand strength in traditional online retailing put it in a strong position to lead the UK’s fast growing premium digital media sector in the years ahead,” says Martin Olausson, director of digital media research at Strategy Analytics.

However, the music data in the survey was only based on 246 people talking about their interest in buying downloads, so it has no relation to current market share. Amazon also came out on top for video and games.

The new Lost & Damned Grand Theft Auto IV expansion pack is going to feature a new Busta Rhymes track, among other tunes. However, there’s more to tell on the music front. The downloadable pack will also let players tag songs they hear in the game and then purchase them on iTunes.

This marks a change from the original GTA IV, which used Amazon as its partner for song purchases. Publisher Rockstar hasn’t given a reason for dumping Amazon for iTunes, although having previously said it used Amazon because it sold DRM-free tracks, perhaps Apple’s announcement that the iTunes Store is ditching DRM spurred the switch.

The expansion pack is exclusive to Xbox 360, though, so PS3 players won’t be able to take advantage of the new functionality.