Music and movies - give away the soundtrack

This week the Soundtrack to Juno bounded to number one on the charts. A measly 65k units is all it took. Not great for a #1, but these days, its a great total for any theatrical soundtrack. Which raises a question. If a best selling soundtrack sells about 100k units, and 99pct of the rest sell under 10k units, is selling a soundtrack the best use of the music ?

I think not. Whether sold digitally or by CD, the reality of today's music and theatrical release market is such that music from movies would generate more total dollars for everyone if it were given away with the purchase of a movie ticket.

To release a major motion picture theatrically these days costs a lot of money. Not only does it cost a lot of marketing dollars to release a movie, not a single movie company in this country has any idea which money that it spends really drives people to theaters. Thats a problem. So where does music fit in ?

One way to entice people to get off the couch and attend more movies is to increase the value to customers. The most cost effective opportunity to increase value is to give away items to theater goers that have a very high perceived value, but a very lost cost of distribution.

Enter music.

How many people are going to rush out and buy the Soundtrack to the new Rambo movie ? But riddle me this. How many more people would go to the movie if they knew that their movie ticket stub had a code to unlock a free download of the movie's soundtrack ? Or if they bought a ticket online in advance of the release, they could download the soundtrack right from the online ticket site ?

Talk about a possible win win. Music publishers would make far more money getting paid a lump sump or for every song downloaded by ticket buyers than they would from sales of the soundtrack. The total cost per song to the studios would be a fraction of their marketing budgets and probably only in the thousands of dollars. The incentive to consumers to buy movie tickets, lets just say it would certainly be more than without the music.

And there is no reason to stop there. Why not offer downloads of the script to people who have already seen the movie (meaning the download of the script would start a couple months after the movie was released). It could be for free with a ticket stub code, or could be sold for a couple bucks per download without. Again, its just more value to the consumer, without much cost to the studio.

Bottom line, is that anything that can be delivered digitally as a download could be bundled into the value of a movie ticket and delivered from the ticketing site, the studio or from the theater's website. The cost to deliver a song, script or even video (like what you might find as extras on a dvd) digitally is nominal relative to the marketing investment required to get people to the theater.

Why not ?

[moses27]

I like it. With the music industry in a decline due to all the pirate downloading going on and the fact that anyone can produce a label or album right from the comfort of their home at a low cost, i think it might raise the music industry back up and at the same time appeal to the consumer.

[dog649cat286]

http://home.kimo.com.tw/dog649cat286

[lanchas9]

Music industry is so death if they keep doing business like during the past 5 or 6 years since the mp3 came in the picture.
They haven?t realize how simple is to download a song, or even better, to get it for free must of the time.
The record labels have not been able to adapt to technology for the new generations. Right now is better to release music over Youtube or MySpace than to any CD or online music store.
People wants to be entrained and there are a lot of free music out there, so why to pay extra cash. So its better to hear free music from independent artist (must of them are really good and it's free in mp3.com or music.cnet.com)
Music should be free and everyone should be able to download music, and the good deal is to have summer tours and live presentations and get 50 or 60 bucks per person. Live performances are the next big business.

[rampagebegins]

Excellent idea, and bonus for me, as soundtracks are my favorite music medium. In the "old days" I'd go to at least two movies a week, now I go to one every couple of months. Would like to see more, but these days, who has the time? I also used to always seek out the soundtrack to my favorites! No longer do that either, but would definitely get my a@# to the movie theatre if they offered me the soundtrack for free!

[Bonzootoo]

Nice idea. I do believe the movie companies would have to pay on a per CD given away as that is how writer's fee's etc. are counted and the writer's would insist on being paid. Also there could be no guarantees unless the director did not use certain groups since many big groups such as the Rolling Stones allow movies to use their songs (for a fee) but do not allow there music on soundtracks - so the audience would have to know that sometimes the big songs would not be on the CD.