Following all that chatter about the merit of mainstream artists withdrawing their tracks from iTunes in order to drive full album sales, Estelle, one of the artists participating in the informal experiment, is back on the Apple download store proper, with the consensus being that the temporary withdrawal from the digital music service cost her label money.
As previously reported, Kid Rock recently made a big deal about how well his recent album did despite his refusal to sell his music via iTunes. His chattering coincided with a Wall Street Journal article that pointed out that those classic artists whose music is still not available via iTunes - namely the Beatles and ACDC - scored much higher back catalogue album sales than similar artists who were, such as the Rolling Stones.
It's assumed that key to this trend is the fact that iTunes insists that consumers are able to buy albums on a track-by-track basis. It seems that when faced with that option, many consumers will buy two or three tracks off an album - maybe the big single releases - rather than the whole album.
A number of artists have criticised this rule because in their minds their albums are complete pieces of work not to be split up. Meanwhile, aside from the artistic dimension, there is a simple commercial quandary here - when people spend three dollars on the three tracks they want off an album, they aren't spending seven dollars buying the complete album, with all the tracks they don't want.
It was with that in mind that Warner Music completely withdrew Estelle's album 'Shine' off iTunes, possibly having noticed how much better signature track 'American Boy' was selling than the whole album. The aim, it seems, was to force consumers to buy the full album - either physically or from download stores that allow labels to only make albums available as complete packages - rather than just that one track.
Billboard reckon the experiment back-fired, because the uplift in album sales was negligible, and in the meantime the label saw a slump in single track sales. Here is Billboard's maths...
"At best, Atlantic could say it picked up 1600 units in album sales and at worst, you could say that all three weeks were consistent with its sale history of the last two months. Meanwhile, if the sales trends are any indication, 'American Boy' would have sold an additional 225,000 [single track] downloads during the period when the track wasn't for sale. So if you multiply 225,000 by the wholesale cost of 70 cents, it totals $157,5000, while the album sales at a $7 wholesale cost brings in $11,200. With this in mind, revenues fell by an estimated $146,300, or nearly $50,000 a week".
Presumably no label would choose to lose $50K a week, so one would assume Warner's Estelle experiment throws doubt on the idea that withdrawing an album from iTunes can be good for overall sales.
Of course the fact Warner even thought about this experiment shows that many record companies are still driven by the desire to maximise short-term album sales. With single track sales in the digital domain not the expensive loss-leaders they became in the CD world, and with those single tracks now available forever and not just during a six week CD single campaign, it's possible that, rather than agonising over iTunes refusal to budge on its single track policy, labels should be thinking about their business in a different way - measuring success in long term single track sales. In much the same way artists may have to stop thinking about their creative output in neat sets of ten tracks.