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Fans find comfort in grief streaming

Chris Willman

LOS ANGELES • Refrain from consuming Meat Loaf’s music after his death? The singer’s fans would do anything for grief, but they wouldn’t do that.

Meat Loaf’s streams and sales jumped after his Jan. 20 death, and his 1977 Bat Out of Hell album is a solid candidate to re-enter the top 10 as a result of the resurgent interest in his catalogue, statistics from the past few days show.

MRC Data says that on Jan. 21, the day most of the public learned of Meat Loaf’s death, his on-demand streaming rose 4,650 per cent from the baseline established since the beginning of the year. But many fans really, really wanted to own a piece of Meat Loaf, as the jumps in sales were particularly impressive. Album sales went up 18,684 per cent and individual digital track sales rose by 33,793 per cent.

The percentage increases are remarkable especially considering this was not a typical example of an artist who was racking up only minimal streams before he died. Meat Loaf’s 45-yearold hits were still being consumed in sizable numbers even before his passing.

On the day before the news broke, Thursday, Jan. 20, Meat Loaf had 205,666 on-demand audio streams — a number that many artists who’ve just put out a new album would be happy to achieve. But that figure was, of course, blown out of the water the following day, as his songs were streamed 9,344,181 times.

Actual sales, on the other hand, had fallen to a mere trickle before his death, as they have for nearly all artists. The day before the news broke, he sold just 54 full albums and 95 individual tracks, per MRC. But the following day, a sizable number of fans went on digital buying sprees. Meat Loaf’s catalogue sold 12,675 albums on Friday and 36,346 tracks.

It wasn’t just a one-day phenomenon.

Although consumption wasn’t nearly as rabid Saturday as on Friday, and the drop-off in sales was particularly steep a day later, Meat Loaf’s on-demand streaming remained solid going into the weekend. His audio streaming total for Saturday (not including video streams) was down just a little over half from Friday to Saturday. Audio streams amounted to 3,140,805 on Saturday, still 23 times the amount he would have had on a normal day in January — suggesting that the hunger for songs like Bat Out of Hell, Paradise by the Dashboard Light and I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That) was far from sated by just a single day of grief-streaming.

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2022-01-26T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-26T08:00:00.0000000Z

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