The Mail on Sunday’s exclusive distribution deal for Prince‘s new album Planet Earth has aroused a wave of publicity, both within the paper itself and in the wider media.
Banner ads have been emblazoned across the MoS for the past few weeks, plugging the freebie and the fact that, in the UK, the CD currently only available with the paper or if you attend a Prince concert at London’s O2 Arena.
Business and media columns have been rife with speculation about the implications for the record and press industries of this “unprecedented” bypassing of traditional retail outlets. However, the hype seems to have been wasted on arch MoS rival the Sunday Express. On the same day that two million-plus copies of the MoS with free CD were distributed, the Express’s SMagazine led its Buy It… column with a plug for the album, “out tomorrow”.
But the whole point was that Sunday Express readers COULDN’T buy it in a conventional manner unless, of course, they made a different choice at the newsagents!
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