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Encore: Coldplay tops album chart, thanks to old-fashioned sales and modern tricks

ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:

And finally, today, the british band Coldplay topped the Billboard 200 this week with its latest album.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WE PRAY")

COLDPLAY: (Singing) And so we pray, for someone to come and show me the way. And so we pray, for some shelter and some records to play. And so we pray. We'll be singing "Baraye."

SCHMITZ: That's the song "We Pray," featured on Coldplay's album "Moon Music." None of the singles have blown up in a big way. And as Stephen Thompson of NPR Music reports, that makes the album's success come as a bit of a surprise.

STEPHEN THOMPSON, BYLINE: This year has brought plenty of new and newish artists, fresh stars like Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Shaboozey. So it feels almost quaint to see the Billboard 200 topped this week by the earnestly anthemic British uplift of Coldplay.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL MY LOVE")

COLDPLAY: (Singing) You got all my love. Whether it rains or pours, I'm all yours.

THOMPSON: "Moon Music," Coldplay's 10th studio album, is its fifth to hit No. 1 but its first in a decade. That chart performance was fueled almost entirely by an old-fashioned metric, album sales, which accounted for nearly 90% of the band's 120,000 equivalent album units. That's Billboard speak for the cocktail of sales, airplay and streaming that goes into ranking the performance of albums on any given week's Billboard 200 chart.

Some of that success was aided by high-profile TV appearances on "SNL" and elsewhere, but newfangled tricks helped too. The album was available in no fewer than eight different vinyl editions, including two signed versions and a Target exclusive edition with three extra tracks. Plus there were six different CD editions and four different discounted download editions, including two that include scads of bonus tracks.

Pick your metaphor - they pulled out all the stops; they left it all on the field; they made fetch happen. Still, with no blockbuster hits and not a ton of streaming or radio airplay, it seems doubtful that "Moon Music" will hold on to the top spot for long. Stephen Thompson, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FEELSLIKEIMFALLINGINLOVE")

COLDPLAY: (Singing) It feels like I'm falling in love... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Stephen Thompson
Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)