Forbes: Amazon's $0.99 BTW deal WAS because of UMG
I was just reading an article about Madonna's tech promotion and spotted this:
Quote:
Madonna’s most unusual promotion, however, involves Fab.com. The nine-month-old design-focused retailer boasts 3 million members and has dedicated its homepage to MDNA, which it’s selling in both physical and digital format for $7.99, half the price of most other outlets.
“We’re on MDNA over here,” says Jason Goldberg, Fab’s founder and CEO. “It’s kind of our way of giving a big fat kiss to our members for how they’ve embraced us over the past nine months.”
It’s also a boon to Fab.com. Goldberg says his site is seeing two to three times its typical traffic because of the promotion, and expects to sell tens of thousands of copies of the album, which should move hundreds of thousands of units on the whole.
Goldberg wouldn’t discuss the details of his agreement with Universal Music Group, parent company of Interscope, the label that’s home to Madonna. But he did confirm that there was a “collaboration” of some sort.
What’s the nature of that collaboration? Hard to say for sure, but it probably means that Universal gave Fab.com a discount on the wholesale price of the record—like they did with Amazon and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way. A source told me that the Amazon negotiated to pay a wholesale price of $7 for the album, which the online retail giant briefly sold for $0.99.
Duh, this is old news. Billboard only counted those 99 sales because Amazon paid the full price for them.
Quote:
According to the New York Times, Amazon paid Gaga’s distributor, Universal, full price, meaning they lost more than $3 million. That is certainly a ton of money to have kicked into your campaign by an entity that has no actual interest in how well your album sells, and it provides much fodder for anyone wishing to quibble with the validity of the 1.1 million number. But Lady Gaga should still get a lot of the credit: Amazon would have wanted to pull this kind of sales gimmick with someone, and, thanks to the all-permeating pop-culture presence that Gaga has cultivated, she was the top option
I'm the last one to call her desperate, but people were saying that Amazon did this all on their own without label support. Forbes is now saying different.
I'm the last one to call her desperate, but people were saying that Amazon did this all on their own without label support. Forbes is now saying different.
The title implies UMG organized the Amazon sale, when in actual fact they were paid $7 for every copy sold. It was 100% Amazon's decision to sell it as a loss leader.
All this article is confirming is that Amazon paid the full wholesale price ($7) and sold the album for 99c for promotion of their cloud service (as fab.com is doing w/ MDNA).
I'm the last one to call her desperate, but people were saying that Amazon did this all on their own without label support. Forbes is now saying different.
Did some naive people really think this was not a business deal between Amazon and UMG?
All this article is confirming is that Amazon paid the full wholesale price ($7) and sold the album for 99c for promotion of their cloud service (as fab.com is doing w/ MDNA).
Are they trying to shade GaGa? If so, I'm not here for this. 