Coldplay Nixes New Album on Spotify

Anyone who flips on the Super Bowl halftime show in February will hear Coldplay’s latest songs free, but don’t expect to find them on unpaid streaming music services for awhile.

The band’s new album “A Head Full of Dreams” went on sale Friday but was unavailable on Spotify and other online music services that have a free tier.

That puts Coldplay in the company of Adele and Taylor Swift as the latest megastar artist to boycott services that let listeners hear songs free on demand. Spotify offers all-you-can-eat tunes to people who pay outright with $10-a-month subscriptions or or who sit through advertising to listen without ponying up. With 75 million people using the service regularly, the startup is helping lead a fundamental change in how music makes money: on-going subscriptions to an on-the-go catalog of millions of songs rather than individual digital track downloads, like those typified by Apple’s iTunes store.

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That shift has some in the recording industry — Coldplay, Adele and Swift among them — worried that giving away songs is bad for album sales and artists. The jury is still out on which side suffers in these standoffs. Adele and Swift have crushed album-sale records as they kept their music off streaming services like Spotify. But Spotify also experienced its strongest user growth ever since Swift started her boycott, as people unfamiliar with the service learned of it through the megastar. Chief executive Daniel Ek has called her protest “a big success” for his startup.

Friday, Spotify’s page for “A Head Full of Dreams” carried this message: “The artist or their representatives have decided not to release this album on Spotify just yet. We’re working on it, and hope we can change their minds soon.”

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The album was also absent from YouTube — even for subscribers to Red, the online video site’s new $10-a-month paid tier — as well being missing on SoundCloud, a popular site known for user-uploaded audio.

However, as with other moves to keep new songs off free streaming, clever fans can find loopholes to listen free. The album is available to stream on services like Apple Music that offer a free trial, so anybody who has never tried that service before can sign up and listen to “A Head Full of Dreams” and any other music in the catalog for three months without paying.

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In addition, people who subscribe to YouTube Red automatically get a subscription to Google’s other music service, Google Play Music, where they can stream the new Coldplay album immediately.

The plans for Coldplay to withhold the latest album from free streaming were earlier reported by the Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources. That report indicated that “A Head Full of Dreams” wouldn’t be available immediately on free streaming sites, leaving the door open for the songs to make their way onto services like Spotify in the future.