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Media
Mirror sales up 27% on Prince giveaway day
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 14 July 2010
Last weekend’s Prince freebie helped the Daily Mirror sell an extra 334,000 copies compared to the previous weekend. Sister Scottish title Daily Record, which also bundled copies of new Prince album ’20Ten’ in with their paper, saw a sales uplift of 45,000. Well, I’m assuming it was the free Prince CD that helped the two tabloids sell more copies. Although I heard somewhere that the internet is dead, so perhaps it’s a sign of one time web surfers returning to print.
We don’t actually know what either title’s total sales were on 10 Jul or 3 Jul (ie with and without the Prince), but Billboard did some maths based on both papers’ most recent ABC circulation figures and reckons the Prince CD helped the Mirror score a 27% increase in paper sales, while the Record only had a 14% increase. It’s thought that when the Mail On Sunday gave away Prince album ‘Planet Earth’ in 2007 they experienced an uplift similar to the Mirror.
It’s not really known what the Mirror paid to licence the new Prince album, though some are quoting figures in the region of £250,000, which is considerably less than what the Mail spent in 2007, but that’s not surprising given promotional budgets have fallen across the newspaper industry, and the Mirror has never had the same level of budgets as the Mail. The quarter of a million would not include the publishing royalty Prince will get from the release, which will be paid via MCPS rather than directly to the singer.
Whatever, the MD of Trinity Mirror’s national papers, Mark Hollinshead, seemed happy. He told reporters: “We are delighted with the huge response to the Prince promotion which has proved to be a successful sampling opportunity for both titles. This was also a great example of our editorial and commercial teams working closely together which resulted in the most effective way for Prince to reach his legion of UK fans”.
