Coldplay Keeps New Album Off Spotify. Surprised? You Shouldn’t Be
Coldplay? has held back its new album, A Head Full of Dreams, from Spotify, becoming the latest A-list artist to avoid the world's largest paid music service.
pulled its catalog in August (it returned 11 months later). In December, the Black Keys opted to kept El Camino off Spotify. It did the same with their 2014 album Turn Blue.
Coldplay again prioritized purchases over streams with its 2014 album, Ghost Stories. The album was made available Spotify as well as Deezer and Rdio four months after the CD, LP and digital download were released. (In a page taken from radio promotion, the band did release three singles to Spotify.) And in an effort to drum up purchases, the album was also available as a free stream at iTunes the week before release.
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A similar playbook was used for Dreams. Coldplay released an audio-only video for “Adventure of a Lifetime” on Nov. 5 that has racked up 11.9 million views to date. The official video was released November 29 and has 3.2 million views. Again, Coldplay has taken either a political or economic stance against ad-supported stream of an entire album. And like it has done in the past, Coldplay has used streaming — tracks only — to promote its album.
Adele and Taylor Swift may be the biggest artists to hold back albums from streaming services, but they’re hardly the first. The two female stars appear to have ideological differences with Spotify and some other streaming services. Coldplay is different. It plays hard to get with Spotify but acquiesces after a few months. Expect the same this time around.