So, this is interesting, methinks. The latest band to release its new album via that consistent champion of new music that is the Mail On Sunday is, erm, McFly. Yep, the McFly boys’ fourth album, ‘Radio:ACTIVE’, will appear as a free covermount with the 20 Jul edition of the Sunday tabloid.

Look, here’s what Tom McFly says: "We get to put it [the album] into almost three million homes, which is an incredible opportunity for us. Hopefully the three million people will all enjoy the music and they'll decide to see us when we go on tour”.

While MoS chief and recently appointed McFly champion Stephen Miron says: “As part of The Mail On Sunday’s ongoing innovation in bringing new music to the masses and exactly a year since we created a world first with Prince’s new album, we are absolutely delighted to be involved with one of the UK’s biggest selling pop acts, McFly”.

The Mail On Sunday have, of course, been innovators in the covermount space in recent years, even if their innovating isn’t especially welcome in some parts of the music industry.

To review - as those generic eighties, classic rock and love song covermounts that all the papers gave away earlier in the decade ceased to appeal to the public, the MoS were among the first to work on artist specific releases. Initially these were bespoke greatest hits collections with classic artists like Brian Wilson, Blondie and Duran Duran, normally featuring primarily live material and often released to coincide with and promote new releases or tours from those artists. Then there was the tabloid’s re-release of a whole classic album in the form of Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’. And then, with that rather controversial (if you’re a record label or music retailer) Prince covermount, the new era of covermounts began where artists actually release brand new albums via the paper rather than (or in addition to) a traditional retail release.

The music industry has always had a love hate relationship with covermount CDs. In the early days of compilation covermounts both publishers (via MCPS) and record companies quietly approved of the newspapers’ CD promotions, and licensed catalogue tracks to them, because they provided a useful new revenue stream at a time when the money made through traditional record sales was just starting to go into decline.

But those major label divisions specialising in compilations, and the record retailers for whom compilation sales were a valuable market, weren’t so impressed. Some artists and managers, meanwhile, took exception to the fact that tracks from their catalogues were appearing on pretty tacky genre compilations being given away with middle of the road tabloid newspapers. Pressure was put onto the labels to not participate in covermount promotions, and generally they complied so that when existing agreements with newspapers and their agents expired they introduced covermount bans in the UK.

But there was no denying that, while most newspaper covermounts were a bit tacky and cheap, weekend papers had large readerships and big advertising budgets, both of which should be of interest to artists and labels. It was with that in mind that agencies like BigTime (who, of course, we worked with on such music projects – let’s not try to hide that!) and more recently Upfront reinvented the covermount so that they could work as marketing platforms for new releases or touring activity or, as the Mail On Sunday have started doing of late, as a platform for actually releasing new material from big name artists.

While most in the industry see the logic of using newspaper covermounts as marketing platforms to promote other CD or ticket sales, once you start actually releasing new albums via a newspaper certain parts of the industry get nervous again – unsurprisingly given you start treading on their territories. Retailers again are the biggest critics, as they lose their cut of some of the big album releases when they are given away, while labels too fear a trend where they lose their relationships with major selling artists as soon they are out of contract because said artists have other avenues open to them for distributing their music.

The attraction for the artist, though, is easy to see. First, they reportedly receive a fee that dwarfs the average label advance and comes with none of the risks of receiving a cut of record sales. They also receive their publishing income (assuming they write their own songs) and presumably maintain complete ownership of the recordings regarding future performing royalties, something they’d have previously had to share with their record companies. It also means a band who may normally sell somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 copies of any one album in the UK can get their music into the hands of 3 million people in the space of one day. It’s good for ego and exposure, the latter of which can boost ticket and merchandise sales.

All of which means it’s pretty obvious why a band like McFly, who recently launched their own indie label after completing their deal with Universal’s Island Records, would want to do a deal with the Mail On Sunday. Firstly, it gets over the problem of how the band’s own label can afford to release their new album without doing what most labels founded by established artists do, forging an alliance with a major. Secondly, it puts music by a band desperate to reach an audience outside their loyal teen fanbase in front of a wide demographic of three million plus people, and could just launch a band who have both benefited but also suffered from Island Records’ clever marketing of McFly as a boyband with guitars to a wider pop fan audience (as I think we’ve said on about 82 million previous occasions, they certainly have the tunes to appeal to such an audience).

For the Mail On Sunday to choose McFly is perhaps more surprising. Those labels and retailers who oppose (or fear) the ‘original album covermount’ proposition have the reassurance that there are a finite number of artists that the Sunday paper would want to work with on a project like this. Releasing covermount CDs is not a cheap business, and the MoS will want to know an artist will deliver extra sales of their paper before making that investment. Which means that while the paper may steal some of the biggest artists from the labels, there is a limit to the expansion of their CD releasing venture. Plus those really big artists were not always actually the biggest of earners for the labels (the old established bands tend to make more through touring than recording).

But the fact the MoS has chosen to work with McFly perhaps shows they are more adventurous than we may have thought in terms of their A&R. While we love McFly here at CMU, and while they have dominated the teen pop market in recent years, they are not an especially huge mainstream band, and not a band you’d think would have the MoS’s target market rushing to the newsagent on a Sunday to pick up their free CD. The traditional teen fanbase may lead to some extra sales through pester power, and the move has certainly got the paper lots of press coverage, which could lead to curiosity sales. But I think there is some risk on MoS’s part in this venture which is interesting, in some ways commendable (hell knows I’ve wanted McFly to expand their reach for long enough), but for those watching the paper’s moves in this space carefully, possibly worrying.

Anyway, that ended up being a lot longer than I expected, which always seems to happen when I write about McFly. But are covermounts a good idea? Will this one work for both McFly and the Mail? Yes and no, and time will tell, that's what I say!