Who has said albums are not selling anymore? It depends on what album we are talking about, since some of them are actually making strides. As a matter of fact, it’s going very very well for the band Mumford & Sons, whose new album ‘Babel’ just sold 600,000 copies in its first week in the US according to Nielsen SoundScan. Not only this is the biggest debut sales week of 2012 but, think about it, it means it beat up Justin Bieber’s ‘Believe’, which only sold 374,000 copies.
‘Babel’ is also the second largest digital sales week for an album (420,000), the first one being Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ (662,000) in 2011,… but remember at the time she got some help from Amazon who sold the album for $1 for a single day.
However, the most surprising thing is another number: ‘Babel’ was streamed 8 million times on Spotify during the first week of its release! This is astonishing and demonstrates that streaming services like Spotify do not interfere with an album sales, on the contrary it seems it would have stimulated them?
Kenneth Parks, Spotify's chief content officer, declared to the LA Times:
‘Our streaming numbers sit alongside a very healthy sales volume. We're living in a new age. There isn't a single model of consumption for recorded music.’
If this model applies to anyone, this means that artists that haven’t allowed their albums to be streamed on Spotify such as the Black Keys, Coldplay and Adele are totally wrong. Although Adele is doing pretty good…so what can we conclude?
But you know what they say, a correlation doesn’t mean a causation. If Spotify didn’t hurt Mumford & Sons’ sales, who knows if it helped them (didn't you cover that a couple of weeks ago? People who use Spitify buy more music? -Editor)