New Mumford & Sons album Babel is fastest seller of 2012 in UK and US
Band also smash Spotify streaming record, confounding critics of the service
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 3 October 2012
Fast folk ... Mumford & Sons' second album, Babel, has stormed to the top of the UK and US charts. Photograph: Matt Kent/WireImage
Mumford & Sons' Babel has become the fastest selling album of the year in both the UK and the US.
The group's second album sold 159,000 copies in its first week in the UK to hit No 1 on Sunday, and 600,000 copies in the US to secure them their first US chart topper.
In the US, the band also smashed Spotify's record for streams from an album in a single week. Users streamed "around eight million listens" from the album in its first seven days of release, Spotify chief content officer Ken Parks told Billboard, beating the previous record by a factor of three. According to Parks, one out of every 10 Spotify users in the US listened to a track from Babel last week. The ad-driven streaming service claims 15 million users worldwide.
Mumfords' dual success has dented the argument that subscription services cannibalise sales of CDs. Acts including Coldplay have withheld their new albums from Spotify and competitors like Rdio and Rhapsody during the week of release. Spotify has also been criticised for offering lower royalty payments to labels and artists than they would receive from album sales.
"Spotify is a huge form of exposure, and they're not stealing," Daniel Glass of Mumfords' US label Glassnote Records told the LA Times. "It's retraining people to buy music through streaming services. Could we be getting better compensation? Yes, but I'm not going to hold it back from them. That's old thinking."
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