Mumford And Sons - Dual Success For Mumford And Sons As Babel Tops UK And US Charts

Mumford and Son’s second album, Babel is the fastest selling album of the year, in the UK and the US. A report from The Guardian today reveals that Babel sold 159,000 copies in its first week on sale in the UK and landed itself at the top of the UK albums chart in the process. In the US, they sold a staggering 600,000 copies and also topped the Billboard album chart in the States as well.

As if that wasn't enough success for Mumford And Sons to achieve in one week, the band have also beaten Spotify’s record for the number of streams from an album in a single week. Spotify users reportedly streamed “around eight million listens” from the record in its first week of release, beating the previous record by ‘a factor of three.’ Spotify’s chief content officer, Ken Parks told Billboard that one in every 10 Spotify users in the United States streamed a track from Babel last week. These results have somewhat quashed the popular theory that streaming services have a detrimental effect on CD sales.

Some major bands, such as Coldplay, have withheld their album releases from Spotify during the first week of release, fearing that it will impact negatively on people purchasing the album. Daniel Glass of the Mumford and Sons’ US label Glassnote commented “Spotify is a huge form of exposure, and they're not stealing…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.”