Though Coldplay's "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends" is a bit of a mixed bag, the roll out for it has been pretty much a perfect primer for the Music Industry 2.0.
They gave away the first single "Violet Hill" for a week on their website to generate free publicity and then announced free concerts in London and at Madison Square Garden to promote it further. Then, they saved the hotter single "Viva La Vida" for use in an iPod commercial, letting Apple (and its way deeper pockets for advertising) to drum up even more publicity for them.
The results so far have been huge. "Viva La Vida" is now the band's biggest American hit ever, poised at No. 2 to become their first No. 1 single here. And first-week sales of "Viva La Vida" in their United Kingdom base may be their biggest ever, though because of the release date, it will be split between two weeks on the chart. Nevertheless, in its first three days of sale in England, the album went platinum, selling 300,000 copies and selling more than the rest of the Top 5 albums combined.
(All those sales came with many leaks of the album available on the Internet and the band has made the entire album available on I Heart Music for days.)
It's been great news for EMI, which has been the major label that has been struggling most with the changing music industry landscape. Whether Coldplay's results are good enough to save the company remains to be seen, but they are certainly off to a good start.
Hear "Viva La Vida or Death and All is Friends" here
PHOTO: Coldplay -- Will Champion, Guy Berryman, Chris Martin, Jonny Buckland -- by Stephan Craneanscki for Capitol Records.