Best night of the year - probably Friday, November 17, 2006
I'm standing in Hammersmith Apollo having just seen Deacon Blue do a fantastic gig.
This is my fifth time of seeing them live over the years, which included once in a club in Washington USA in 1989 on their first US tour - it was a tiny club befitting their unknown status in the US and I was taking the Greyhound bus touring round the entire USA, when the two tours coincided.
Anyway, the gig has just finished & of the two thousand or so crowd, there's 500 of us in a queue waiting for the live CD of the gig to be burnt and sold immediately.
I saw this notion discussed a couple of weeks back on a BBC News programme. Idea being
- kills off the bootleggers opportunity of illicitly recording & then distributing the material
- provides better quality recording for the fans, as it comes straight out of the mixing desk
- provides additional revenue for the band
- satisfy impulse demand of the crowd, who've just had a great time, to preserve the memories.
Really impressive - 10mins after the gig finishes, the CDs are being handed over. At £15 each that's a 50% enhancement to revenues on the ticket. Each gig has run this process so from a tour you get say 15-20 unique recordings to sell as a byproduct of existing performance effort. Not only that, but the band avoids all of the studio costs and marketing expenses that would ordinarily be involved in producing an album.
The promotion literature on the night insisted that only 400 copies of the CDs would ever be made available - buy it now or lose the chance for ever type offer. Doubt that the scarcity element actually bothers the customer in this instance, so they may as well sell as many as they can thereafter, especially as they have a marginal cost of near zero.Great solution, great biz & very happy customer!
posted by John Wilson @ 11:36 PM Permanent Link
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