No Doubt the Ticket’s More Valuable

The band No Doubt (of “Just a Girl,” and “Don’t Speak” fame) has come up with a promotion for its current tour that’s both interesting and revealing.  Here’s the key tidbit, as told by E! Online:

“On Saturday, when fans buy the top price-level tickets ($42.50 or more before taxes and fees) to their latest tour, they’ll receive free downloads of the band’s entire catalog, including more than 80 tracks from the Gwen Stefani-fronted group’s seven studio albums.”

There are some really interesting things here.  Obviously, it demonstrates (as if you weren’t convinced already) that when it comes to entertainment, the live side is the engine and the recorded side is the caboose.

But let’s dwell on that last part for the moment.  A year or so ago, a man named Chris Anderson (who also wrote “The Long Tail”) wrote a piece in wired magazine called “Free!”  I strongly recommend you read all of it, but here’s an excerpt that gives you the basic gist:

“…until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)”

(BTW, that last part about Gillette is a reference to earlier in the piece, where Anderson describes the old Gillette strategy of giving away razors in order to sell blades later.)
In my TED talk, I mentioned that my Bruce Springsteen album in 1985 cost me $35 in terms of 2009 dollars, but only $10.99 now.  That was partially true in the sense that I would pay $10.99 if I bought it on iTunes.  Now, I would buy it on iTunes because the hassle and mild ickiness of stealing it on Pirate Bay or Limewire is not worth the money to me, but there are plenty of people, naturally, who don’t feel the same way.

Which means that in reality, the market price of that recording is somewhere between what I would pay for it (already dramatically reduced from a generation ago) and free, with the number creeping toward zero more and more all the time.

Ultimately, I believe it will become so hard to get a price for recorded music that it will more or less be seen as a marketing expense and given away, much as No Doubt has done here.  In our inaugural Edition, Stewart Copeland of The Police was talking about how new bands sometimes don’t even bother making a CD because they get so much more control and profit out of making t-shirts or other merch.

It’s truly a new world, and we’re lucky to be on the right side of it!  To stay there, though, we have to stay sharp, creative and attentive to the people buying the tickets!