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Green Initiatives

Some folks within the BMG family of record labels appear to be trying one last scheme to sell some form of physical product in a brick and mortar setting: The download gift card.

I have now received two as promotional mailings, one for Brad Paisley's newest album, 5th Gear, and another offering 30 of Elvis Presley's #1 hits. They would appear to hang on a spinner rack at retail, and, like gift cards, require activation at check-out. The list price on both is a pre-printed $12.99. Brad Paisley's value added is two bonus videos, a bonus song, and a digital booklet; with Elvis, you get 30 #1 hits, one of those digital booklets (I can't even begin to guess what such a thing looks like, and if I were slightly more curious I'd download one just for the spectacle of the thing), and a "bonus track" that I don't know nearly enough about Elvis to decipher.

The cards themselves have been designed, as much as one can design on something the size of a credit card, and I suppose the hope is that people will keep and collect the cards themselves once they've downloaded the files. No, surely they can't hope that, can they? Anyway. Here's what the front of the Elvis card LOOKS like. You tell me...

I suppose I will keep these soon-to-be artifacts somewhere, perhaps in the box in the backroom where I have a nice stash of pre-recorded open reel tapes. Which, one of these days, need to go up on eBay rather than taking up closet space, but no matter. And I can't believe this will work, though I am sympathetic to the impulse. Too little (far too little), and way too late, I fear.

But it is a more environmentally friendly form of music retail, at least in theory, and by some margin.

Word of a more troubling "green initiative" came from Folio, the publishing trade magazine, while I was traveling last week. WalMart's green initiative task force has decided to cut their newsstand by 800-1000 magazines (system-wide, I'm sure; I can't imagine any one WalMart has that many titles, but, then, I don't frequent the place), retaining only those titles which sell 50% or better.

This, they say, is driven by an environmental concern, a desire not to waste paper. Which, if one believed it for a heartbeat, would be commendable.

But the only green WalMart recognizes has dead presidents on it. That's a powerful motivator for environmental good, make no mistake.

Here's the context, though. Twenty-odd years ago, when I began a short stint as a regular contributor to Guitar World, a 25% sell-through was considered normal, and the staff (as I remember it; I wasn't staff, so this was second-hand) got a bonus if an issue sold over 30%. That means if three out of ten copies on the newsstand sold, the publisher was so happy he parted with money. And that was a publisher who did not foolishly separate himself from his checkbook.

That percentage has changed some over the years, but (keeping in mind that I rack -- or re-rack -- the newsstand at the family bookstore) very few titles regularly sell 50%. Our circulation consultant used to tell us we needed to push retailers who regularly sold that many copies of ND to increase their draw. Some of this is psychological: You can't sell the last piece of pie at a coffeeshop if it's sitting alone on the plate. And nobody wants to buy the last, dog-eared copy of a magazine. Go into a bookstore and look at how many copies of a new title they have stacked on the tables by the front door. It's not simply that they hope to sell that many...something about having that big stack out there inspires people to buy.

Now...magazines take up space, they're labor-intensive (we have to work the shelves every couple days to keep them where they're supposed to be, though we rarely have time to do it that often), and they're not a huge profit center. And, of course, they're made of dead trees, and there's a certain contingent of younger people who turn up their nose at the prospect of ink splattered on dead trees.

Despite all the chat that print is dead (designer David Carson's pronouncement during RayGun magazine's heady early days), print is not dead. (No Monty Python joke here, please.) Print is being redefined, sure enough. But what print does best does not play well online. Print does long, wordy, thoughtful pieces well. The interweb is good at quick jabs of news and snarky opinion. But my blogs are almost always too long, and they'd be very short pieces within the pages of ND.

That means, at least to me, that it's important to provide homes for magazines which offer up ideas, for we need an informed democracy if we're to continue having anything which resembles a democracy. And to have WalMart cut a thousand titles, plus or minus, when WalMart is the dominant retailer (and others will, inevitably, follow its lead), even without looking to see how many of them are Guns & Ammo annuals or whatever...that's just not good for the flow of ideas throughout our culture.

Which isn't to say that we should be telling WalMart what to do, but which is to say that you would be well advised to support your local, independent newsstand.

And be not deceived: WalMart is cutting magazines because it makes financial sense for them to do so. Perhaps that argues that the business model underpinning the magazine industry is faulty (and perhaps it is). But mostly it argues that WalMart thinks they can make more money using that retail space for some other purpose. It has nothing to do with the environment. The fact that I mistrust their motives and fear they're using this simply to justify not carrying magazines with which they might disagree...nah, they wouldn't do that, would they?

And, no, ND has never been in WalMart. We don't have a dog in this fight, not directly.

Once again: Cheap is not the highest good.

Posted by grant on February 18, 2008 9:14 AM | Permalink

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