how can a record company buy its own cd's?

[Chief]

how would it work? would numbers be tampered with or would the stock need to physically disappear?

[Lunatic]

who knows?
perhaps it's just a lie & never happens
will likely never know

[GangstaBoogy]

My guess is they would wholesale order them from a retail company. Obviously Jimmy Iovine or Jay-Z wouldn't walk into a record store and physically buy 75 copies of their artist' albums.

[Chief]

My guess is they would wholesale order them from a retail company. Obviously Jimmy Iovine or Jay-Z wouldn't walk into a record store and physically buy 75 copies of their artist' albums.

yeah i dont know man, i know the artist wouldnt go in and buy 75 - 300,000 copies from a shop, but the music biz is highly regulated and monitored... not sure how its possible to pull off buying their own cd's.. unless it's legal?

[We Fly High]

well it aint hard to get an intern to run to the record store and just buy every single copy on the shelf.

a company like Def Jam probably has like 50+ interns. So opening week of album release, they send out 10 interns each day, to go to every single record store in the NYC area, and just buy every single copy they find on the shelves of any retailer. And they'll do this process nationwide through all their satellites.

the stock needs to physically disappear. Retailers like WalMart, Best buy, Virgin and FYE don't offer wholesale orders. Thats not what a store does. A store buys the cds at wholesale from the distributors. Its not their job to sell cds for wholesale, they need to make profit off of it.

The extra money that is tacked ontop of the wholesale by Best Buy wouldnt really even affect Def Jam that much. In this day and age, the music is used as a vehicle for promotion of other things that the artist does (commercial placements, endorsement deals, touring, tv show, etc).

 Def Jam distribution sells 1000 cds to Best Buy at $7/CD, for a total of $7,000.
It only cost Def Jam $0.50 for each cd, for a total of $500 in manufacturing costs. That $500 worth of CDs will bring in a wholesale value of $7,000 from Best Buy, which equates to a $6,500 profit for Def Jam. 
They send out interns to buy 500 cds at $12 each, for $6,000 total. They're still making $500, and at the same time leaving 50 other CDs for the public to buy, and at the same time generating a very important "artifical soundscan buzz".

And they only do this for the first week anyways, so its not like theyre continually spending all their money buying back their albums.. Its all in the sake of generating first week figures which in turn, generates publicity. Prime example: Kanye/50.

Figures and numbers are everything these days... it aint even about the money made from CDs. no one really makes money off of it, its a well known fact.

[K.Dub]

My guess is they would wholesale order them from a retail company. Obviously Jimmy Iovine or Jay-Z wouldn't walk into a record store and physically buy 75 copies of their artist' albums.

That'd be funny

[Snoopafly-1986]

My guess is they would wholesale order them from a retail company. Obviously Jimmy Iovine or Jay-Z wouldn't walk into a record store and physically buy 75 copies of their artist' albums.

That'd be funny

LOL

[R1ZE]

Buying your own CDs = bad business

[virtuoso]

Well first of all you have to bear in mind the sound scan sales are based on the numbers that have been shipped and not actually sold by the retailer. The easiest way to manipulate the numbers shipped is to offer a free album for any one which they purchase. I think there has been a lot of furore directed towards Def Jam before accusing them of having done so. In reality though, I think most of them do so. It's not bad business either, you want your artists to be at the top because you then set off a chain reaction because then others want to buy into the music to. So the manipulation will actually generate real sales to, it makes perfect sense albeit it is very cynical and unethical.