I bet you thought the record industry actually wanted people to buy their records.

The estimable PopBitch details how UK labels refuse to actually make songs with massive demand available for purchase — deliberately missing the Christmas binge period for Nicki Minaj “Anaconda”, Gwen Stefani “Baby Don’t Lie” and Mark Ronson’s superlative “Uptown Funk” (which you should definitely play right now).

They’re all on YouTube, making fractional pennies per view, but the actual locally-chartable sales aren’t happening because the labels refuse to release them in that territory, as if the Internet never happened. The only vaguely plausible reason anyone can come up with is that the people running the PR campaign are attempting to make that campaign look good, and never mind the bit where the business is supposed to pick up all the free money lying around.

(“Uptown Funk” is finally being released before Christmas, with talk of intra-Sony shenanigans to achieve this.)

2 thoughts on “I bet you thought the record industry actually wanted people to buy their records.

  1. Could it simply be a contractual issue. Many artists have different labels distributing their music in different territories. If a label ha music that there is a demand for, they most definitely would want to sell it as many places as they are contractually allowed.

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