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Arcade Fire label boss accuses Amazon of devaluing music
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 16 August 2010
Laura Ballance, the co-founder of Arcade Fire’s US label, Merge Records, has accused Amazon of “devaluing music” after the etailer decided to sell the download version of the band’s new album, ‘The Suburbs’, for just $3.99.
‘The Suburbs’ went straight to number one in the US, shifting 156,000 copies in its first week, 97,000 of which were downloads.
Speaking to the LA Times about Amazon’s discount, balance said: “Unfortunately, that’s not up to us. Devaluing music is something that concerns me greatly. But it’s hard to draw a hard line on it. At this point, people can download music for free if they really want to. If you’re trying to get people to buy music, people who wouldn’t otherwise, maybe that’s the way to do it. Just to make it so cheap that it tips the scale. It’s tricky. I find the resistance I had five years ago to music getting cheap is being broken down over the years by relentless pressure. People want to pay less”.
As for the fact that Merge has just managed to get its first number one album in the indie label’s 21 year history, Ballance isn’t particularly excited. She said: “The whole chart thing is kind of like sports. The need to have a ranking is kind of meaningless. I’m more like, ‘It did good? That’s great'”.
‘The Suburbs’, of course, went to number one in the UK as well. Amazon UK also sold the album at a discounted price of £3.99 during its first week of release.
