Wednesday, December 31, 2008
MP3 Amazon Taking A Loss On MP3 Sales?
Posted by Sam Machkovech on Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 12:18 PM
Saw a message from Seattle's Astronautalis this morning, begging folks to download his latest record. Legitimately, anyway. It's up at Amazon's MP3 download service for $3.99 right now, a decent discount from the default $10, but that's not what interested me. More like this:
the best part of the whole deal...i get paid the full sale (which is normally like $9.99 or something)...amazon is taking a loss on this [to] try and get some market share from itunes. They are pushing deals like this...artists take no loss and people get music turbo cheap. totally rad.
I flipped through Amazon's MP3 album best-seller list (Astro's at #71 thanks to the discount, it seems), and sure enough, tons of the top-sellers are down to $5 a pop—Fleet Foxes are near the top of the discount list.
There's no way artists are agreeing to reduced prices across the board, so Astro's story may check out. I suppose the company's holiday super-success can afford them such a luxury. Musicians don't typically get the total cash for MP3 portal sales, anyway, so perhaps Amazon's giving up their usual % as a last-ditch shot at the online music market. Might as well.
And, yeah, I checked. He's not part of the promotion.
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