LOS ANGELES — Refrain from consuming Meat Loaf’s music following his death? The singer’s fans would do anything for grief, but they wouldn’t do that.
Meat Loaf’s streams and sales jumped by massive amounts in the immediate wake of his passing Thursday, and his 1977 "Bat Out of Hell" album is a solid candidate to reenter the top 10 next week as a result of the resurgent interest in his catalog, statistics from the last few days show.
According to MRC Data, on Jan. 21, the day most of the public learned of Meat Loaf’s death the day before, his on-demand streaming rose 4,650% 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%, and individual digital track sales rose a whopping 33,793%.
The percentage increases are remarkable especially considering that this was not a typical example of an artist that was only racking up minimal streams before he died; Meat Loaf’s 45-year-old hits were still being consumed in sizable numbers even prior to his passing.
On the day before the news broke, Thursday, Jan. 20, Meat Loaf had 205,666 on-demand audio streams — a number that a lot of 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 prior to 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 catalog 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 it was on Friday, and the drop-off in sales was particulxjmtzywarly 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, the latest day for which figures are available from MRC Data.
Audio streams amounted to 3,140,805 on Saturday, still 23 times the amount he would have gotten 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.
Both sales and streaming will be major factors when Meat Loaf presumably makes his reentry on the Hot 100 and Billboard 200 charts. Those chart positions won’t be seen for another week, though, as the singer’s death coincided with the end of a chart reporting period.
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Singer Michael Lee Aday, who goes by the stage name Meat Loaf, arrives at the MusiCares Person of the Year tribute honouring Neil Diamond on Friday, Feb. 6, 2009, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)
