[kj] ot: Bruno and Bono's box office blues

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/07/bruno_and_bonos_box_office_blu.html


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Bruno and Bono's box office blues

Rory Cellan-Jones | 08:52 AM, Tuesday, 21 July 2009

Are Sacha Baron Cohen and Bono - two artists whose previous products
were huge hits - now finding out how quickly a networked society can
give the thumbs down to something it finds sub-standard?

A friend from the music industry drew the parallel between the two.
Sacha Baron Cohen's latest satirical outrage Bruno - the travails of a
gay Austrian fashion designer - followed on the surprise box-office
smash that was Borat. U2's latest album No Line On The Horizon came
five years after How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, one of the
biggest-grossing albums of all time.

But while Bruno was the top grossing movie in the United States on its
opening weekend, receipts fell away very sharply from $14.4m (£8.95m)
on the Friday to $8.8m (£5.5m) on the Saturday.

What's being blamed? Twitter.

In the old days, a cult movie would build its reputation over weeks,
even months, by word of mouth. That, and a lot of smart marketing, is
what helped Borat become a big hit in the States.

In this photo provided by Digg.com, Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as
the Austrian flamboyant fashionista, Bruno, left, poses with Digg
Dialogg host Andrew Bancroft during an interview in West Hollywood,
Calif., on Tuesday, June 30, 2009And this time around, the producers
of Bruno could build on that last success, with a bigger marketing
campaign and a series of stunts. But word of mouth now happens on
social networks. So within minutes of emerging from the cinema, many
of those who saw Bruno on the opening night were bad-mouthing it.

Here are a few examples I found in a Twitter search for July 11th, the
day after the opening. "I liked Borat, but Bruno was just a retread."
"my roomates saw Bruno last night. From what they said i doubt ill be
going to see it." "Bruno was one of the stupidest movies I have ever
seen.... What a waste of $30!" And, most damning of all, "BRUNO wasn't
all that funny."

And with this movie right in the middle of the apparent Twitter
demographic (many Facebook users would be too young for an adult-rated
film), the comments appear to have had an effect - hence the abrupt
fall in receipts on the Saturday, which would normally be a bigger
night at the movies.

Now let's look at the UK sales figures for No Line On The Horizon
compared with those for How To Dismantle An Economic Bomb. The 2004
album sold around 200,000 copies in its first week, whereas in 2009,
U2 sold a very respectable 158,000 CDs - though that was after weeks
of an unprecedented publicity campaign.

But Atomic Bomb kept on selling, with big leaps every week until,
after five weeks, it had achieved UK sales of 822,000. But after five
weeks in online and high street stores, from Amazon to HMV to Tesco,
No Line on The Horizon had only crept up to 258,000 sales. In their
fifth weeks, the 2004 album sold another 150,000 copies - whereas in
2009 U2 struggled to get to 10,000.

Now there are many possible explanations for that. The music market,
as we all know, has changed radically in five years, and shifting any
CD is harder. The album was leaked online before its release, and tens
of thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of potential customers
got to hear it for nothing from the likes of the Pirate Bay.

Online retailers, like Amazon, were selling it very cheaply - for as
little as £3 - and there is a theory in the music industry that
lowering the price can actually damage sales by convincing people that
you've got a cheap product not worth seeking out.

But here's another theory - that in a digital age where it was easy to
sample the product legally, through services like Spotify, or through
illegal file-sharing, word of mouth happened at the speed of light.
And the verdict was that there were not enough decent songs on the
horizon to make it worth shelling out for an entire album.

-- 

-- 
iPat Davies
www.amag.org.uk
http://twitter.com/ipat23