Tool Have Amassed Millions of Streams in Just Three Days, Lateralus is #1 on iTunes
Friday marked a huge day in the Tooliverse, as the band’s entire catalogue was made available in online digital formats for the first time ever. Never without controversy, a lot of discussion revolved around the band’s decision to wait so long: was it a smart move for the band to wait this long and make an event of it, or did they miss out on gaining new fans during the past decade from their notable online absence?
I’m in the latter camp — there’s an entire generation that had no easy way of diving deeper into Tool’s catalogue after hearing the requisite radio songs (spare me your “go buy a CD!” argument, please) — but it appears as if the thirst for Tool’s music on streaming services was indeed quite strong anyway, likely among the band’s older fans. As of press time for this article, three days and change after the band’s music went live on streaming services, Tool’s top ten tracks on Spotify are performing quite well, with six of them garnering between 1 and 1.2 million streams and the remaining four all sitting above 700,000. The band already has over 1.7 million “monthly listeners,” a Spotify tally that measures how many individual users have streamed the band’s music over the past 28 days (so expect that number to rise significantly by the time the band’s first 28 days on the platform have passed).
On the iTunes download store — yes, it still exists — the band’s 2001 release Lateralus is currently the #1 album (view the chart here). Interestingly none of Tool’s other albums appear in the top 100.
On YouTube, Tool’s music is buried in the YouTube Music section of the site and doesn’t easily come up in a standard search. Streams of individual tracks on Lateralus are in the 2k range, suggesting not many fans are consuming Tool music there.
The other services Tool’s music is now available on do not make their statistics public.
Do you stream Tool this past weekend? What’s your service of choice? Sound off below while we wait for the band to release a new single, presumably this week, for their forthcoming album Fear Inoculum.
