#1 selling album this week from 98K of sales?
The 1975, a hard working, always touring band had the #1 selling record this week.
Which isn’t the news in my opinion. The news is they had a #1 with 108K of combined sales (98K of pure album sales), which is anemic, in my opinion (not a reflection on the 1975, but that the public isn’t buying music much anymore.)
And they windowed their record off Spotify.
Let’s put this in perspective: Adele’s “Hello” had 159,051,646 streams on Spotify alone by October 23, 2015.
Billboard considers 1500 streams = 1 sale. Adele had 106,034.40 “album” sales from one single alone through only Spotify streams!
Most news publications in Nov of 2015 wanted to applaud her iTunes sales numbers (1.1 million) that week, but it’s the streaming that’s interesting.
Adele’s the biggest star on the planet, so it’s unfair to compare her impact to the 1975, who have had one major hit single. (Their song “Chocolate” has earned 92 million streams total.)
But it’s not like 1975 haven’t been using Spotify: They’ve released three singles on the streaming platform so far from this album, and the streaming counts are 21, 11, and 6 million of each single so far.
What we have is a war on windowing releases, trying to convince enough fans to buy a record on iTunes or in physical format before putting it on streaming; or releasing one single on streaming to see how it does before holding off on the record’s release.
I don’t know what any of this means anymore. All I know is we should put fans first, and windowing doesn’t seem to do that.
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