“Streaming services dance to Adele’s tune,” reads the headline to yesterday’s Financial Times story about the distribution plans for Adele’s new album ’25’.
It could just as easily have read ‘Journalists dance to Adele’s tune’ because there is no official word on those plans: sensibly enough, the emphasis for the new album’s release is entirely on the music rather than the digital strategy.
The FT does shed some light on what we might expect when ’25’ comes out though: “The singer is leaning towards “windowing” the album — making it available on CD or as a paid download for a period of time, before putting it on streaming services, according to people familiar with the situation,” it claimed, while quoting industry analyst Mark Mulligan’s view that ’25’ is likely to sell in huge quantities regardless of whether it’s available to stream or not.
Adele, like Taylor Swift, is one of the industry’s great outliers in terms of her ability to sell physical albums by the truckload as well as digital downloads.
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