According to Billboard, Coldplay will probably have its third No.1 album this week with ‘Mylo Xyloto’, with a projection of a minimum of 450,000 copies sold by October 30th at the time I am writing this.
With 440,000 copies sold, the album would become the third biggest sales week of the year, behind Lady’s Gag ‘Born this way’ and Lil Wayne’s ‘Tha Carter IV’. Interestingly enough, if it goes beyond this, it would be the largest sales ever for a rock album, they just have to do better than U2's ‘No Line On the Horizon’ which debuted at No. 1 with 484,000 on March 21, 2009. In the UK? They are number 1 and already sold 208,000 copies in its first week. So early indications show that ‘Mylo Xyloto’ will be a top-selling album this year.
And my point? Did the album benefit from being ronaccesible from Spotify and other streaming services? Were people more willing to pay for it because they could not stream it? May be, but we will never know, because there’s still the piracy download widely available anyway.
Lady Gaga’s album ‘Born this way’ sold almost 1.2 million copies the first week in the US despite the fact it made its debut on Spotify, a few days before its official release! Of course she got a little help from Amazon which was selling it for only 99cts for a little while and also the album sales dropped to only 169,387 copies the second week,… so who knows what was the Spotify effect in her case. Did it help or not?
In fact, there are very few artists who, like Coldplay, are big enough to dictate terms and can control their streaming deals. Most other artists don’t have that benefit, and they are stuck with their label’s decision and very probably the streaming of their album on Spotif
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