Gary Numan, Mogwai, Maxïmo Park, the Coral, Sports Team, Shame. Not the lineup to a cancelled two-day festival in Kidderminster, but acts who used D2C marketing to land high-charting albums. This ugly acronym stands for direct-to-consumer, and means pushing sales of physical records – often limited-edition – via their official stores and those of indie retailers. Their maxim, to quote Dua Lipa via Olivia Newton-John, is: let’s get physical.
The album charts are chiefly dominated by streaming data, but that takes a while to bed in. Albums have to be streamed hundreds of times to “equal” a CD or LP sale for chart purposes; but, when they do, they will keep you in the charts for years (see: Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles, Lewis Capaldi). Smaller acts therefore regard D2C as guerrilla chart action – bursting through the one-week window when physical sales count most. It reached its apex in February when Mogwai got to No 1 off the back of a social media drive – including taking part in Tim Burgess’s Listening Party on Twitter – to sell physical and download copies of their album, As the Love Continues.
Normally D2C is a flurry of activity, but Gary Numan, for his recent album Intruder, turned it into a two-year art experiment. “We had picture-disc vinyl and signed deluxe CDs – but if you pre-ordered the album you got access to video streams of Gary in the studio,” explains Bruce McKenzie, sales director at the D2C company Townsend Music, which helped run it.
Inevitably, major acts are now co-opting this blueprint: Taylor Swift pulled forward the CD edition of Folklore in August 2020 to stay at No 1 (keeping Fontaines DC off the top).
Yet some smaller acts have opted out of multi-formatting on principle (Sleaford Mods, for example), or are actively trying to disrupt it. Art-rock mavericks Black Midi attempted to break chart rules by hiding a golden ticket in one physical copy of album Cavalcade (prize options included them being your function band or free guestlist tickets for a decade), and streamed the album in full on YouTube two days before its official release. “It has taken such a long time to try and get thrown out of the charts!” jokes Lisa Goodall, head of marketing at Black Midi’s label Rough Trade. In the end, the standard black vinyl format that contained the golden ticket was disqualified and the album charted at No 60.
However, keeping one eye on the charts is not just about ego. A high-charting album directly affects an act’s offers for touring and festivals. “You can be bumped up the bill because you’ve got a Top 10 album,” says Goodall.
In Aesop’s fable, the expeditious hare lost to the plodding tortoise, but in today’s charts the quick bolt for the finish line is the best way to make a lasting impression.
