Whilst recovering from the festive indulgent customary at this time of year I happened to find myself watching the 3rd installment of the Ice Age franchise which we bought as a Christmas present for my kid. The film itself is reasonably diverting which is nice, because I’ll be forced to endure it many many more times. More interesting than this animated child fodder is the fact that distributor has chosen to include a digital copy of the film on the DVD and are openly encouraging folk to stick it on their laptop and iPod to enjoy on the go. Now you may remember that this is precisely the sort of behaviour I have been suggesting for the music industry. It makes some sense to include either a digital copy with the CD/Vinyl or a promo code to download it for free – after all, the vast majority of buyers will simply rip the CD before they even listen to it. The latter option seems like a terrific opportunity for further cross sell and upsell as the download site would be crammed with advertising. Bands could even withhold hidden tracks or downloadable extras to incentivise fans to download rather than rip it.

I’ll be interested to see whether a) this becomes common practice for film and TV distribution and b) whether the (infuriatingly retarded) music industry will take the cue and start doing the same. We can only hope.

Tags: Music Industry

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Indulgence, Resources for Bands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.