'The Sun leads the way to future of music," the nation's biggest selling daily proclaimed last Thursday. On Saturday it followed up the pledge with a Napster-branded lotto card, tucked inside its 3m-plus editions, each with a unique code allowing readers to log on to the music website and download a track for free. Readers can choose from a list including the Darkness, Blur and Blondie.
"Revolution is so easy to join," the paper's blurb continued. But the revolution the Sun is speaking of isn't the only one taking place. Downloads may be effecting seismic shifts in the way people consume music, but they're also opening up new opportunities for newspapers and nonmedia brands alike.
Today, the London Evening Standard follows hot on the heels of the Sun, becoming the second newspaper in less than a week to jump on the download bandwagon after tying up for a similar giveaway with Wippit. The Guardian launched its own download service on its website during Glastonbury through a deal with EMI. Two weeks ago, Times Online, the virtual home of the Times and Sunday Times, offered an extract from a supposedly lost track purporting to be by the Beatles.
The model adopted by the Sun and the Standard is essentially about circulation. The former's deal with Napster will run for the next seven Saturdays, rewarding loyal readers with eight tracks from the site's 750,000-strong catalogue, enough for them to burn their own album. The Evening Standard is giving away 50 tracks from Wippit's collection of 175,000, including Elvis Presley, Santana and A Man Called Adam, to readers who collect two tokens from its pages over the course of this week.
Paul Myers, Wippit CEO, is under no doubts as to why newspapers are queuing up to get involved. "It's a lower-cost alternative to CD cover-mounts," he says. This view is confirmed by Sean Mahon, head of marketing strategy at the Sun and the News of the World: "Instead of giving away a CD with pre-selected tracks, readers can decide for themselves what music they want from the Sun." But he insists free downloads won't mean CD cover-mounts disappear.
The potential is certainly there, however, and also the chance to reach out to those ever elusive younger readers. According to the National Readership Survey, the dailies have seen an overall 7.5% decline in sales to the 15-to-24 year old demographic from 2002 to 2003. Sidling up to them with free digital music offers a chance to win them over.
The papers are imitating the comarketing deal between Pepsi and Apple's iTunes in the US, in which millions of tracks were handed out in an attempt to cement relations with teenagers. Coca-Cola followed suit with a similarly gargantuan giveaway, promoting its MyCokeMusic download site. McDonald's Big Mac Meal Tracks offer got under way in the UK last week, with free downloads on offer via Sony Connect.
For all these brands, and newspapers in particular, aside from the cost advantage free downloads have over cover-mounts, there's also the element of traceability. "You can give away 1m discs but 950,000 of them may end up as drinks mats," says Wippit's Myers. Readers who respond to online promotions leave a data trail, which feeds back into future marketing opportunities. The Sunday Times attempted to emulate this with the launch of its CD-Rom, The Month, which it has distributed with the paper since last August. The multimedia package gives readers content to browse on their PCs, plus links to various online promotions, their use of which can be tracked at their discretion.
The latest figures from the Sunday Times' parent company News International claim that The Month is responsible for an uplift in circulation of between 5% and 8%, taking it to over 1.3m copies sold in June. Based on its own survey, News International says that between one million and 1.2 million of the paper's three million-plus readers are using the CD-Rom.
So not that many drinks mats, perhaps, but this figure is derived from sample projections rather than the number of people actually going online. That statistic is not available but Peter Bale, online editorial director of the Times and Sunday Times, says the Beatles' single alone generated 12,500 downloads on its first day and this success spurs the company on. "I'm keen to put more audio on to the site over time but we have no fixed commercial plans to offer downloads at the moment," says Bale.
Simon Waldman, director of digital publishing at Guardian Newspapers Ltd, is keen to draw a distinction between the Sun's partnership with Napster and Guardian Unlimited's own tie-up with EMI, which saw the site selling tracks for 99p from Glastonbury performers, including David Bowie, the Bees and Lenny Kravitz. "One's about selling more newspapers and Napster promoting itself. The other's about newspapers working out how they're going to fit into what's destined to become a digital music industry," he says.
"How people consume music is going to change a lot over the next few years and that creates some interesting opportunities for media companies to help them navigate through this new musical universe."
Waldman harbours concerns, however, about some of the brand associations that seem to be proliferating as newspapers and non-media companies alike rush to get "down with the kids". "In some cases it can be a bit like watching your dad dancing at a wedding," he says. The fear that free downloads may exacerbate the devaluation of music, something for which CD covermounts have already been blamed, is a commonly voiced complaint.Is the "future of music" merely a sideshow to the Sun's real business?
Rob Wells, new media director at Universal Music Group UK, thinks not. "The problem with people using music free of charge is trying to convince them it has intrinsic value. But it's about educating punters. If these promotions get people turned on to downloading music then it's a good stepping stone and there will come a point again when consumers spend money on music for music's sake."
· Jonathan Webdale is senior reporter at New Media Age
