David Emery Online

Singles

1 May 2008

The headline seen across the web yesterday:

Coldplay single downloaded by 600,000 people

Obviously the concept of giving away music for free is hardly a new one – Radiohead blah blah blah… – but I think this is an interesting spin on it. The role of the traditional single is to basically act as a loss leader for the album, getting the band played on the radio and generating publicity.

Giving it away for free in this manner seems to achieve pretty similar goals, without having to mess around with all that tiresome selling.

600,000 is a pretty big figure, and if you managed to sell that many you’d be laughing (although not necessarily in profit) – it’s a pretty huge promotion for the forthcoming album (as good on online promotion as you’d ever hope for, really). It also comes at a point when the physical single is all but dying out; digital download sales are where it’s at and CD singles are becoming an ever rarer sight on the shelves – it’s pretty hard to sell something if it’s not in the shops.

The net result of this is that – other then maybe the top twenty – the singles chart is quickly sliding into irrelevance. You’ve really got to question why you would actually bother going to the effort of making a physical single, recording b-sides and promoting it when you can simply tell radio you’re releasing a digital single on xyz date; you don’t have to do a thing and you still get the valuable album promotion from radio plays.

The other interesting aspect of all of this is that they’re still going to sell the track as a more traditional single after they’ve stopped giving it away for free; it will be very interesting to see how well it does. When Radiohead released In Rainbows on iTunes I think a lot of people were surprised how well it sold, but the set of people that will download something for free off a (relatively) untrusted website is a very different set of people to the ones that normally buy off iTunes. It’s why all the talk about digital piracy harming sales is massively overstated – yes, you might have lost a small amount of sales but the people downloading things illegally weren’t going to pay for it in the first place.

Of course, it would have been a lot more interesting if the song was any good…