The Montreal/Texas band Arcade Fire has just released a new album, Suburbs. Arcade Fire is about as big as indie bands get, and their plan is to stay indie – as far as I know.
You can buy the new album here:
http://www.arcadefire.com/ …
And some interesting notes about how you can buy:
* Premium digital ($7.99)
* CD + Premium digital ($12.99)
* Vinyl + premium digital ($24.99)
All orders come with non-premium digital (ie in lossy m4a format) … with “visuals for each song, lyrics & contextual hyperlinks.”
Finally, you get one of 8 covers … randomly assigned.
In short:
- low quality digital is the baseline
- and it’s implied that if you want that for free you can find it
- everything else is a bundle of some sort: digital + something
- high quality digital, and physical copies are premium products
- a kind of customization: only 1 in 8 purchasers will have the same cover as you.
The digital is almost a give-away, everything else you are paying because you care enough to have something more substantial.
I suspect the big problem in the book business is that most books aren’t worth caring about enough to want a memento. So the real problem in publishing is not so much the shake-up of digital, but rather that consumers (and publishers) just don’t care that much about the majority of books that are published and bought.
One Comment
Hugh, have you seen this?
http://www.bits-and-mortar.com/2010/08/launch/
It’s a coalition of indie roleplaying game developers. They call it “a pro-retailer, pro-brick-and-mortar, pro-PDF, pro-eBook initiative”. Basically, when someone buys one of their games in a brick-and-mortar game shop, they provide simple ways for the game shop to give the purchaser a PDF version at no extra cost – so they don’t need to order on the internet (and so fail to support their local game shop) in order to get the additional usefulness of the PDF. Win all the way around.