Notice anything new on streaming services this week? Of course you did: Spotify and others are adding new albums on a weekly basis. One new listening opportunity caught our eye this week however: Coldplay's Ghost Stories. It's an album that was released for purchase more than four months ago but was withheld from streaming services until now (although it did go up on Beats Music last month as part of an exclusive deal with Apple, according to Digital Music News).
Did preventing fans from listening online encourage them to buy? It's kind of difficult to tell. Yes, the album sold 383,000 copies during its first week on shelves, the largest debut of any band on the Billboard 200 yet for 2014. On the other hand Coldplay isn't the best subject for such a study as it already had a huge fan base...it's difficult to figure out whether albums being bought indicate listener loyalty or something else. The band used the same strategy with its previous release Myloto Xyloto during 2011 but again, streaming numbers have increased enough since then that it's tough to find a correlation-although that album also debuted with 60,000 more copies sold than Ghost Stories.
Either way, Coldplay can't exactly claim that holding out from streaming services was a loss.
A better study for whether withholding from streamers is working might be Sam Smith. As Music Times previously reported, Capitol Records kept his album In The Lonely Hour off of Spotify and similar as it went head-to-head with Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence in its first week. Del Rey outsold Smith 182,000 to 166,000 during week one but after three weeks Smith had overtaken her. The real story was told by the number of singles sold: Smith moved 2.5 million individual downloads compared to Del Rey's 367,000.
In The Lonely Hour eventually became available for streaming but his album stayed in the Top 10 for more than 10 weeks.
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