Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto Not Hitting Streaming Services
Coldplay will withhold its newest album, Mylo Xyloto, from all music subscription services. The move will prove somewhat unprecedented for a major artist working today.
Released in the United States on Tuesday, October 25, the release will mark the first time one of the biggest selling artists in the world opt not to make their music available on all music streaming sites, which include Spotify, Rhapsody and Mog. Other artists have taken more limited steps to restrict access to such sites, such as Adele, whose number one album 21 is not available on Spotify, but can be found on many other streaming sites.
Though Coldplay’s representatives have not directly responded to the issue, the band’s record label, EMI, commented on the absence in a statement to CNET, who reported the issue on the Wednesday after the album’s release, in a statement that read, “We always work with our artists and management on a case by case basis to deliver the best outcome for each release.”
The move seems to be in response to the small royalties per song play paid to the artist by these services, which can be as low as 0.015 cents per play on Spotify and is 0.91 cents on Rhapsody. In a guest editorial on Billboard.biz, Rhapsody president Jon Irwin argued that though those rates do “seem awfully small,” they are better than the zero dollars an artist receives for pirated music, and will build up revenue over time since payments are recurring, instead of the one time royalty paid after the purchase of an album.
Another album released Tuesday that was also withheld from streaming services was Tom Waits’ Bad As Me. Notably, the album had been streaming in its entirety on the “First Listen” section of the NPR website before the release date, which requires no subscription at all. After the release, however, the stream was disabled.
