Has streaming music online replaced radioplay? As some British music labels are moving towards offering songs to buy online as soon as they’ve been played on the radio, REM seems to be moving in the opposite direction, releasing their new album Collapse Into Now to stream for European fans through Spotify a week before it’s available to purchase.
This isn’t the first “exclusive access” to music before its release that Spotify subscribers have enjoyed, but it is one of the more high-profile pre-release streams offered by the site, and one of the more sizable, with the entire album being available. Whether it’ll be enough to convince lapsed fans (Note: I am one of them) to return to the band after a series of increasingly disappointing albums, of course, remains to be seen.
The streams are available now for premium subscribers in the UK, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden, with the album released in Europe on March 7th.
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