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Mail On Sunday steps back from covermounts
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 24 June 2009
The Mail On Sunday’s ambitions to be a serious music distribution platform are on hold, or at least that’s how it seems. Music Week have spoken to the paper’s newish MD Marcus Rich about his thoughts on music-based promotions, and he’s not so keen on the sort of expensive and sometimes controversial covermount CDs that his predecessor oversaw.
As much previously reported, the Mail On Sunday led the way in the second era of the covermount, the period after all those terrible freebie compilations – greatest love songs, best rock ever, eighties hits – that came with pretty much every weekend newspaper for a couple of years earlier in the decade.
The Mail’s later CDs generally involved partnerships with specific artists, including some spectacular live collections from Brian Wilson, Blondie, The Stranglers and Duran Duran (yeah, OK, I was involved in those so might be a bit biased regarding their spectacular-ness, but they really were leagues ahead of everything that had gone before, honest guvnor).
The Mail subsequently formed an alliance with marketing promotions agency Upfront and started breaking new ground by covermounting full albums rather than promoitonal hits collections, including some brand new albums, most notably the UK release of Prince’s ‘Planet Earth’ and later the new one from McFly, ‘Radio:Active’.
While arguably good for established artists, who would get a nice upfront cheque, big publishing pay out and lots of free publicity for other endeavours, the full album covermounts pissed off some in the record industry, who had always had a love hate relationship with the covermount CD to start with. Labels, and in particular high street music retailers, felt the Mail were providing a platform that enabled artists to cut them out of the equation, and meant they missed out on involvement in (and revenues from) what could be the year’s biggest releases.
Former Mail On Sunday MD Stephen Miron, now at Global Radio, was unrepentant about such things and didn’t seem too bothered about addressing the concerns of tetchy record industry types. When the paper announced it was setting up its own record label to aid future original release covermounts it seemed like the paper really was positioning itself to compete with the tradiational record companies and retailers.
But then Miron moved on, the newspaper industry suddenly realised it had no money and bosses at papers like the Mail started to discover that covermount releases, while perhaps providing a one week spike in circulation, didn’t result in long term sales boosts. And so we get new MoS MD Marus Rich telling Music Week that the record label plan could well be shelved, and that covermounts are likely to be fewer moving forward.
He told Music Week: “We are always looking at ways to improve marketing efficiency. Each promotion will be analysed in terms of its marketing potential and promotional effect. They [CD covermounts] are relatively costly but then all marketing channels are”.
Rich also seems keen to mend any damaged relationships between his paper and the record industry, if only because, of course, music companies are also advertisers. He concluded: “The relationship with the music industry concerns me because they are also advertisers. It is very important that the entertainment category works with and supports the media”.
