26th
When I wrote this earlier I was astonished to learn that the Decemberists had managed to sell nearly five times as many copies of their new album in its first week than their previous record in its first week. Also, 65% of the units sold were digital albums, and Amazon was selling it for $3.99, which has to account for a pretty huge chunk of the overall sales. When Amazon do these deep discounts on digital releases they take the loss and the label/artist gets money for a full sale. So that’s great, it’s a legit win for the artist. If you look at a lot of these big indie music chart hits (Spoon, Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, of Montreal, etc), sales are mostly driven by these Amazon first-day/first-week discounts. Now it’s a lot to ask labels to lower their digital list prices when Amazon isn’t going to automatically take the loss leader hit, but it may be wise for the music industry to seriously consider dropping these prices to encourage sales in the future. It seems obvious that a huge number of people are more willing to buy digital albums at these lower prices, and getting less money is definitely better than getting no money.
