Brian Boydon music.
The new Coldplay album is at number one in the charts, and it didn't even have to be in record shops for a full week to amass its sales.
In an unprecedented move, Coldplay's label released Viva La Vidalast Thursday (all albums in the UK are released on a Monday; here it's on a Friday). In three days the album sold 302,000 more copies than the combined sales of the other top four. Considering that they were Neil Diamond, Duffy, Paul Weller and The Fratellis, that's some achievement.
In a move that hardly could have pleased Coldplay, the Parlophone label brought forward the release date from Monday the 16th to Thursday the 12th in order to cash in on three of the busiest record shopping days in the calendar.
The big spike for album sales is obviously Christmas, but other important dates are Valentine's Day and Mother's Day (or "Mothering Sunday" if you want to be ever so "now" about it). Record sales on the latter two dates don't have a clear run - they're up against confectionary sales and flower sales.
All of this makes Father's Day/ Fathering Sunday a massively important date for the music industry. The sales figures show that Father's Day is now responsible for more album sales than both Mother's Day and Valentine's Day.
To those of you who neither knew nor cared that Father's Day was last Sunday, don't worry. This is a relatively new "retail opportunity" which has been imported from the US in order for shops to sell lots of tat (crap ties, cheap aftershave, etc) and, of course, CDs. In the US alone, $11 billion was spent this year on Father's Day gifts.
It was really only in 2007 that the industry went into a marketing overdrive for Father's Day, after a 40 per cent increase in album sales in the week before. If you look at the Irish Compilations Chart for last week (not included in our chart below), you'll see two very unlikely albums at numbers two and five: 101 Driving Songsand Top Gear Classics 2008respectively.
It's instructive to see what the industry believes to be ideal Father's Day albums. Usually an album is released three weeks before the big date. The huge success story this year was The Very Best of The Platters, which managed to break into the UK top 10 chart on the back of a specific marketing campaign. The Platters, for younger readers, were a vocal group back in the 1950s.
Compilation albums with a picture of a car on the front always sell very well at this time of the year, with the now annual Top Gearcollection usually racing to the front. Stuffed with bloke rock tunes (there's always at least one Oasis track, and there are never any ballads), the album already has a form of "brand identity" due to the inexplicably popular TV programme. Look at what's on offer this year; it seems almost compulsory to include the words ROCK and ANTHEMS in big butch typeface on the cover.
The songs themselves are culled from the handbook of time-honoured rock'n'roll standards. Anything with a piano backing is obviously considered a threat to male sexuality so it's big power riffs played by beardy rockers all the way.
At least the industry is consistent in its stereotyping. For Valentine's Day the labels release those "Ultimate Love" compilations that are so soppily saccharine-infused you get a sugar rush from just looking at the cover. For Mother's Day, it's a glum assortment of female singer-songwriters weeping into their acoustic guitars.
It all makes the decision to bring forward the release of the Coldplay album a rather strange one. Surely the yoga-flexing, tofu-munching Chris Martin and his piano-led melodies don't quite pack the desired amount of testosterone for a Father's Day gift? But these days, it seems, any bloke will do.
