The Guardian is predicting the end of newspaper cover mounts following that recent decision by Universal Music to stop allowing any of its back catalogue music to be used by the newspaper groups. Coming after EMI's decision last year to restrict the use of their music on cover mounts to new artists or "deep catalogue" only, the Guardian reckons that it will soon become impossible for newspapers to aggregate enough content for any cover mount that isn't based around the new artists the labels are looking to actively promote.
The increasing resistance of the labels to participate in cover mounts is, the Guardian say, down to lobbying by the music retailers who argue that while the labels earn a licence fee on promotional
CDs, the record shops lose out because of the impact the freebies have on compilation sales.
They quote HMV's Gennaro Castaldo as saying: "There has been a noticeable impact on compilation sales ... Universal and EMI have responded to lobbying from retailers and the managers who represent the artists."
However
Universal head honcho Lucian Grainge says his company's new no-covermount policy was an internal commercial decision rather than a reaction to lobbying by the retailers: "We decided to stop supplying them for a variety of reasons, partly oversupply.
It was purely based on commercial reasons."
Either way, cover mounts are probably about to peak not so much because of the new policies of the majors, but more because the medium is becoming less effective for the newspapers because of the shear number of generic cover mount releases. The next big craze is almost certainly free DVDs, with a number of weekend newspapers already plundering the movie studio archives for such promotions.
If only there were people developing new promotional platforms that serve both the newspaper publishers and the artists and record labels. Ah, but there are. More on that tomorrow.