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Hi All,

theres a couple of things I'd like to pick up on, related to the earlier posts Tony refreshed and some points since:

FANS
I don't think it's a true that we fans have influenced this project much - time in the industry has made it clear to me that labels don't market to fans because they don't need to: we are the most likely section of WH's audience to buy into a project regardless of any marketing investment. Put simply, there is no return on spend. In addition, as much as labels recognise the need in terms of an artist's image for a visible fanbase, little attention is paid to servicing their needs (except perhaps with special edition box sets, as only true fans will shell out the inflated costs of the recycled material). I return to my ealier point with this: Arista will only release special format / specialist products if they think there is a wider market for them (ergo, the Xmas album). I would love to be proved wrong about this but I doubt we'll see, for example, a live album while WH is still an 'active' artist, despite mentions even by the artist herself that it is in the pipeline. If you take a look at the most popular live albums, they are mainly MOR rock sets for babyboomers who upgraded from vinyl/tape to cd and who will do so from VHS to DVD (Phil Collins, Rolling Stones, Elton John, Tina Turner etc) Live albums for active soul/r&b artists of whitney's generation are rare (eg Luther Vandross - only now, given the success of DWMF and the health trauma has a live album been released). My point is that. even with whitney's huge success (and may be because of it) Arista is following industry logic by resisting the release of a live album. If labels were responsive to fans, we'd have had this years ago, along with the shelved remix album, repackaging & remastering of the early albums (which may yet come). We'd also have had less recycling of the same tracks for b-sides (culminating in the Love, whitney album) and remixes of her tracks which serviced markets other than the club scene.


MARKETING PLAN

It might seem that Arista is coming to the game a little late for Xmas, but consider the following:

- Campaigns for releases (at least in the UK) are divided into marketing and promotion with the former being more about the product and the latter about the artist. I don't want to give out marketing 101 here, but it seems to me that if there is a TV advertising campaign planned, you won't see much of any other marketing (because of the expense, espcially for a limited product) and its fair to say that TV campaigns usually indicate a much smaller promotional campaign, (i.e. we wont see much of whitney promoting this outside appearing in the advert itself, an mildly unusual move). I seems that Arista are focussing on maxmising their spend with TV advertising. This could be for several reasons, not least because they may feel that WH herself is better served by stepping back (this is speculation). If this is the case, don't be surprised if you haven't seem much promo yet - a pre-release build-up is only going to happen if they are looking for big opening week numbers - which would be foolish given the nature of this project.

In addition, it might be difficult to accept, but WH is not a priority for Arista, despite the seasonal nature of this album. They have a raft of artists now who are 'safer bets' , returning much more of their spend because they have the main promotional outlets of TV, Music TV and radio behind them. To give you an example of this, I attended the launch of last years BMG Q4 releases and there was only the briefest mention of JW - and that was a studio album which would seem to have more legs than a christmas product. The implication was that whitney wasn't making herself available to promote so there was little value in doing anything more than a limited TV campaign.

Final point - although the contract was reported to be worth $100m, there are so many clauses (sales perfomance, splitting/matching promotional spend, and staged advances) which limit Arista's spend that its not hard to imagine they can abandon projects (as with JW) or restrict activity (possibly the case with OW).
Projects by the likes of Pink. Xtina and Avril Lavigne are much higher earners for labels because they give much less back to the artists - which means there is a higher return on sales and promotion. This formula incentivises and limits promotional spend (and also creates a need for artists to involve themselves more in earnings from publishing). Whitneys contract might be very favourable on the surface, but if it, or the artist, does not incentivise the label to spend, they wil have no trouble moving on to the next product.