31 Comments

  2. i don’t know what’s “country” after a steady diet of garth / shania / chicks / carrie / r’flatts / taylor. but this is a very good set of country pop. other than taylor swift, no one’s doing it better than lady a.

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  4. This is pretty good pop music – maybe a B or a B+

    As country music, let’s say I hear country influences but not country music

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  10. Wow I am so glad a found your website. I loved the “When you got a good thing” song. After listening it on your website many many times, I decided to listen to the full song on Youtube before finally making it to Itunes and bough it. Wow despite my hundred time listening to it I still have not enough of it.

    Thank you for introducing me to Country music. I am usually an Hip-Hop fan believe it or not.

    I will keep coming to your site in quest of more beautiful suggestions.

    Again, thank you.

    Philip aka the new country music lover. :-)

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  11. …regarding the album, i share paul dennis’ view. regarding the prize that it’s launched at i’m more than puzzled. if the sophomore album of an award-winning band (justified or not), which has been hyped up well over the top since their first release, is made available at $ 3.99 what message does that give to the rest of the industry? fair enough, it buys them the no. 1 spot on the charts, most likely, but at the wal-mart counter you can’t pay your groceries by telling the cashier: can i pay with my no. 1 hit album? …and show a copy of the billboard charts. $ 3.99, even if it’s for a limited time only, is an insult to everyone involved in this project, who gave his best shot. Moreover, it makes it very hard for less well-known acts to put a price sticker on the cd’s that they sell at their concert venues to help covering for their overheads and make a profit big enough for “groceries” and the next record. to me, this marketing strategy feels more like a suicide attempt than a cure for the industry’s bottom-line problems. by the way, i have quite a few cd’s of dwight yoakam, for example, that cost swiss franks 30 – 35.– = approx. $ 30.– – i’ve never felt for a second they weren’t worth it. perhaps, the lady a. people feel their music isn’t worth much more…

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  12. It’s a strategy that many people use when their albums are first released. I don’t think it’s a reflection of them not valuing their work. Many artists even give their music away for free in an attempt to get their music out there to as many people as possible.

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  13. leeann,
    where i come from, the term “what comes free can’t be worth anything” exists already for a long, long time. more often than not it’s not far from the truth. i also make a distinction between unknown/new acts, star acts and already-over-the-hill-acts.

    real stars may not know much in general but they always know their market value. $ 3.99 does not make sense from any which angle you look at it and most of all is not a sustainable strategy – at least not outside of a lala-land. it would only work out if lady a. became a really hot headlining touring-act with tons of cross-over appeal. i doubt that.

    there has been just too much noise and hype about a group that’s less interesting than heidi newfield and trick pony was and that still pales in comparison to paulette carlson and highway 101.

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  14. Tom – Do you understand that what a retailer charges the end user is not necessarily the price it pays for the product? E.g., Amazon sells books for Kindle at a deep discount to obtain market share. It loses money on many popular books it sells, but it brings customers to its product. Walmart is likely doing the same thing: a new album by a hot group that launched a country song into the top 5 with nothing more than an award show performance is exactly the kind of product Walmart (or other retailers) would sell at a loss to get consumers accustomed to buying music downloads from them instead of – say – from iTunes.

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  16. @ cutting the treacle

    i agree it’s a sweet deal for amazon but do you really believe that costumers will ever buy that album in big numbers at a “regular” price if they know that it was available at $ 3.99. lowering a product’s price level is easy – lifting it is almost impossible especially for something like a download, which is a download and nothing but a download. by the way, at $ 3.99 even the covington – simpson class of country artists almost look like a steal.

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  17. Depending if Amazon is taking a loss (e.g. with the Sarah Palin book price war with Walmart), then maybe Lady Antebellum’s strategy is to get their music out there (it is crossover pop which can appeal to a lot of people) and gain fan loyalty. Country albums don’t sell nearly that much in the first week (400k ish).

    I curious to see how many of that 400k was from Amazon. I had already purchased the singles from iTunes so I just completed the album but I obviously would have downloaded it on Amazon.

    So, if their goal was to get mass exposure, sell more units that a lower price…I think it worked (unless the only people who bought the album at $3.99 were the ones that would have bought it anyway)

    80K x $10 = $800,000
    400k x $4 = $1.6M

    4/5 stars

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  18. I bought it at this deal price, but I wouldn’t have otherwise purchased it. I think Treacle is right. Plenty of other artists have either participated in the Amazon deal or given songs away for free, including big name artists. Off the top of my head, I know that Dierks Bentley, John Fogerty, Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, Jason Aldean, etc. have offered their albums at a reduced price.

    I definitely don’t subscribe to the “What you get for free can’t be worth anything”philosophy either. That’s very shortsighted and shortchanges a lot of great, free products or services.

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  19. I have to say that I was quite surprised to see this major of a release be a Daily Deal. As Stephen said, I suspect Capitol’s strategy was to grab curious would-be fans who may have heard about the group or one of their singles (“Need You Now” is getting crossover play) but haven’t taken the plunge yet. I think it’ll work for them. Those would-be fans aren’t going to buy the album otherwise anyway, while many core country fans still buy physical product and wouldn’t even know the deal was happening. (And the young, internet-savvy Lady A fans have probably been doing the iTunes “Complete My Album” thing Stephen brought up.)

    In any case, I don’t think it’s ever a bad long-term idea to discount music like this; as Leeann said, it gets music out there to more people, which generates more word-of-mouth – and if you’re already getting radio play on top of that, you’re gold.

    The idea of a discount reflecting badly on the music’s value is an interesting one, though. I’ve wondered about that some myself, though I tend to come out thinking it’s just the natural progression recorded music has taken as a result of the internet. Music fans now have the power to access everything they might possibly like in one place, and they don’t want to have to pay top-dollar for every single bit of it. That’s why I think the industry would be so much better off using affordable subscription models than all this a la carte business.

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  20. Tom – I’m not sure anyone has a grasp of pricing of products like music anymore. Radiohead gave away their albums for free and then sold them after. There was still a market when Radiohead charged. So, yes, I think Lady A’s album can be released at one retailer at a very low price for a short period of time. And I think when Lady A has a debut like some are suggesting, it will turn heads. That’s free advertising.

    And anyway, given the vast amount of free-downloading, getting $4 / album is better than nothing.

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  22. The only reason I wasn’t super surprised to see this as a Daily Deal is because Urban and Bentley both did it as well, which were both comparably big releases.

    Tom,
    You’ll be relieved to know that the album is back at a normal price on Amazon at $7.99. It was just a very short term deal.

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  23. “The only reason I wasn’t super surprised to see this as a Daily Deal is because Urban and Bentley both did it as well, which were both comparably big releases.”

    Good point, though I would’ve thought the amount of momentum Lady A has right now (with “Need You Now” having been a huge 5-week #1 or something and the debut still selling well) would have put them on a different level. Come to think of it, they’re all Capitol artists, so maybe that label is just really comfortable with this style of marketing.

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  24. dan, i wouldn’t be surprised if some of the capitol people who can still remember the “garth release days” had watery eyes all day long, yesterday.

    leeann, yep that’s more like it. a record for less than a tall hazelnut-cappuchino at starbuck’s is as sound a concept as giving cheap mortgages to people who can’t afford a house. we all know the outcome of that one, don’t we.

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  26. “a record for less than a tall hazelnut-cappuchino at starbuck’s is as sound a concept as giving cheap mortgages to people who can’t afford a house. we all know the outcome of that one, don’t we.”

    There was nothing at all cheap about the mortgages. They were for overvalued property. The only thing that *seemed* cheap at the time was the initial interest rate.

    So until Lady A starts selling albums on time with interest rate resets at just below the rate of usury and begins to repossess albums as the price plummets and record buyers are under water on their album purchases, I think the analogy is dodgy.

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  28. @ cutting the treacle

    …painting a picture with words is always falling short somehow. so yes, analogies are kind of dodgy. then again, that one obviously amused leeann a little and made you think for a minute. that’s not to bad an outcome in my book. consider it a small pay-back for some of your contributions that i found quite refreshing.

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