Snobbishness of Sufjan's label would give your kitty asthma revolver on music

IF YOU'RE only going to buy one album all year, you should make it The Age of Adz, the new Sufjan Stevens release. The album will, rightly, feature in most best-of lists at the end of the year and further copper-fasten Stevens's reputation as an indecently intriguing talent.

Stevens is a poster boy of the Musically Correct and is the perfect name-drop in polite indie society. He will likely never achieve huge sales (and if he did, he'd be blackballed by polite indie society), and acts such as JLS, Cheryl Cole and whoever The X Factorvomits up this year will roundly trounce him in terms of units shifted. Being a cult is one thing – but in these cash-strapped days it won't pay the bills. Critics mumble, but money talks.

So what can you do with a Sufjan Stevens type? Going on the shill for him would be most inelegant and unbecoming – and would give his art-house/balsamic vinegar supporters the vapours – as Amazon.com found to its cost.

Amazon, like any other sane entity, realised that The Age of Adzis a sublime piece of work that deserves a far wider audience than the musically correct ghetto. They did what other retailers such as Tesco and Boots have been doing for years and offered it for a special "promotion" price of $3.99 as an MP3 download.

It was Amazon’s decision to take a hit on this. They swallowed their profit margin in the hope of attracting a big flood of traffic to their site to pick up the download album on the cheap. The thinking was that if people were introduced to Stevens through a cut-price offer and greatly enjoyed their purchase, they might well go back to the site and buy other Stevens albums. There would also be a concomitant knock-on effect on ticket sales and merchandise. The latter, though, would not benefit Amazon in any shape or form.

His label, Asthmatic Kitty, didn't quite see it that way. Even though they were not out of pocket in any way and were having one of their key artists pushed and promoted for them, Asthmatic Kitty sent out a sniffy email to Sufjan Stevens fans basically saying that they shouldn't buy The Age of Adzfor €3.99 on Amazon as you know, like, it's a work of art and eh, you know, art shouldn't be reduced to like the price of a latte.

"We have it on good authority that Amazon will be selling The Age of Adzfor a very low price on release date," reads the email. "We love getting good music into the hands of good people, and when a price is low, more people buy. A low price will introduce a lot of people to Sufjan's music and to this wonderful album. For that, we're grateful.

“But we also feel like the work that our artists produce is worth more than the cost of a latte. We value the skill, love, and time they’ve put into making their records. And we feel that our work too, in promotion and distribution, is also valuable and worthwhile.”

So what would Asthmatic Kitty prefer? That right-on Sufjan Stevens fans should cycle to their local indie record store (run as a co-operative) and pay the full price for the album because Stevens isn’t Taylor Swift or Girls Aloud; he’s like a real musician – arty and all of that? And the bit about “getting good music into the hands of good people”? Is there a certain type of person out there who is “good” because they listen to Arcade Fire and Sufjan Stevens and Animal Collective as opposed to the “bad” people who buy “bad” (ie chart) music in Tesco along with their weekly shop?

Such was the snobbishness and patronising air of the Asthmatic Kitty email that they’ve been pushed into a mealy-mouthed clarification. “We communicated poorly on this,” they now say.

So the whole thing had nothing to do with the fact that The Age of Adzcosts $8 as an MP3 download on the Asthmatic Kitty site as opposed to $3.99 on Amazon. And the insinuation that people who bought the album for the cheaper price were somehow lesser people was just "taken out of context"?

Not at all, says the label. “We thought it would be an interesting opportunity to give food for thought on the perceived worth (or value) of an album. But that discussion should have taken place in a different context.”

Yes, in the context of you and your ilk representing all that is wrong with the independent music sector today.