That week of making the new
Coldplay track 'Violet Hill' a free download went well for them it seems.
EMI claim that around 2 million people downloaded the
first taste of upcoming album
Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends during the one week it was available. Considering fans had to sign up to the Coldplay website to do so, that's a whole bunch of brand new newsletter subscriptions. Canny.
Now the band are following up that move with a new plan. "Buy one get one free". The idea is that whenever someone downloads a track from the upcoming album, they receive another song of their choice for free. Frontman Chris Martin claims the idea comes from working in a British Budget supermarket. Which presumably he did pre-stardom. Unless he was "method-working" in order to convincingly write those everyman anthems. He presses on: "As I said before nobody buys albums any more, certainly nobody buys full albums and we've made an album that you have to have from start to finish." Fighting words.
The singer also says it was a hard task writing the follow up to their US No 1
X&Y, an album that his wife Gwyneth Paltrow claimed her husband thinks is "shit". "I think we were a bit anthemed out after
X&Y" Martin notes. "I feel like we've got everything to prove and everyone to prove it to this time."
This he said while playing table-tennis shirtless against The Arcade Fire at a grassy mountain chalet, as our related image clearly proves.