Stones Defend DVD Sales at Best Buy
NEW YORK (AP) รณ Mick Jagger is defending the Rolling Stones’ decision to sell their new DVD box set “Four Flicks” through Best Buy and no other music retailers.
“This is not like not allowing them to sell some Blockbuster movie, which is going to sell 2 million DVDs in first week, you know, a ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ or something like that,” Jagger told The Associated Press on Thursday.
“I think that this is like really small potatoes compared to that,” he said.
Best Buy, which operates nearly 700 stores in the United States and Canada, won’t say how much it paid for exclusive selling rights. Industry sources estimated Best Buy’s deal easily runs into the millions of dollars given the retailer’s plans to conduct a multichannel marketing campaign that will include in-store signage, national TV advertising, newspaper circulars, direct mail and the company’s Web site.
George Whalin, a California retail consultant, has said Best Buy’s deal with the Rolling Stones gives the nation’s largest retailer of consumer electronics “an edge over everyone else who sells music” because of the Stones’ popularity.
Three big music chains in Canada announced they were pulling some of the band’s merchandise and music off shelves in protest after learning of the deal.
“I feel bad for the stores that aren’t going to have the product, but they have lots of other products, to be honest, and music videos don’t sell anything like movie DVDs,” Jagger said.
But the band had the fans in mind all along when it made the decision, he said.
The Best Buy partnership will allow them to buy the DVD set for about $30 instead of $60, he said.
The set documents three of the band’s concerts from its 2002-03 “Live Licks” tour and features more than five hours of music, including some material never recorded before. Concerts featured are from Olympia Theatre in Paris, Madison Square Garden in New York and Twickenham Stadium in London. The DVD package also includes two documentaries on the band.
Given the Stones’ history with previous albums, the “Four Flicks” DVD set seems likely to sell at least 1 million copies in North America.
The Stones’ “Forty Licks” two-CD set sold about 4 million copies in the United States, according to figures from the Recording Industry Association of America.
“Four Flicks” will be released Nov. 11.
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