Artist News

Coldplay break digital sales record

By | Published on Tuesday 1 November 2011

Coldplay

Coldplay have broken the record for the highest number of download sales in one week, with 83,000 digital copies of their new album ‘Mylo Xyloto’ contributing its 208,000 total sales in its first week of release last week.

According to The Official Charts Company, the previous record holders were Take That, who sold 79,800 downloads of their last album ‘Progress’ in the first week. After that, only two other artists have ever managed more than 50,000 download sales of an album in one week, they being Adele with ’21’, which sold 76,000 copies in seven days in January, and Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’, which reached sales of 57,000 earlier this year.

The Official Charts Company’s Martin Talbot told CMU: “The growth in popularity of digital albums has been evident throughout this year and Coldplay’s impressive achievement in setting this new mark further emphasises this explosion of interest. It surely won’t be long before an album has surpassed 100,000 downloads in a week”.

These figures might add credibility to that argument, put forward by some, that by ensuring their new records were not available via Spotify and other streaming services, Adele and Coldplay increased their download sales. Though those are both albums that were likely to sell well anyway, and both were heavily promoted online. Also not on Spotify was Tom Waits’ 21st studio album, ‘Bad As Me’, which saw him reach the highest first week sales of his entire 38 year career. That album too enjoyed premium front page space on iTunes though.



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