Last week Bloc Party went straight into the Billboard Hot 100 album chart at No 12, selling 48,000 copies of A Weekend in the City. It was some result, seeing as Bloc Party's debut album, Silent Alarm, only ever made it to No 114 in the US.
It would seem that the Yanks are suckers for top-drawer, bleak, urban indie-angst produced by an angry, articulate young man and his sidekicks. Perhaps it was the claustrophobic big sounds which producer Jacknife Lee put around the songs in a studio in Co Westmeath which appealed to American CD buyers.
Actually, the truth behind Bloc Party's entry into the US charts is a little more prosaic. It all came down to "retail exclusives," where the act and their label give bonus album tracks to specific retail chains.
Such deals
are usually the preserve of dinosaur heritage acts such as The Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart. But it was Bloc Party who did the deals with big-box stores Target and Best Buy this time around.
Here's how Bloc Party sold 48,000 copies of their album in the US. In Target's 1,494 outlets, A Weekend ithe City featured two extra tracks, The Once and Future King and Secrets. In Best Buy's 812 shops, the album had Emma Kate's Accident and Version 2.0 as bonus tracks.
Then, there was the album for sale on iTunes (which had Cain Said to Abel as a bonus track and Atonement if you pre-ordered), Napster (where you'd get Selfish Son as a freebie when you downloaded the album), eMusic (US buyers got an extra tune called Rhododedron) and PureVolume (Vision of Heaven was the extra track here).
To top it off, if you decided to by the album in your local independent record shop, you were rewarded with a free seven-inch single containing yet another non-album track, England.
That's a whopping 10 extra tracks spread around a number of different retailers. You can bet that there were probably a couple of thousand Bloc Party fans who ended up buying the new album at least twice during its first week on releasem, just to get all those extra tracks.
Sure, fans could have downloaded the bonus tracks from various MP3 blogs (and many who did commented that the extra tracks were as good as, if not better than, the album tracks). Many, however, probably purchased the album twice, especially seeing that both Target and Best Buy were flogging the CDs for less than $10 a pop.
Inevitably, all these extra tracks will end up on a bonus CD as part of a special edition of A Weekend in the City later this year, giving the album still another sales bump.
This marketing ploy worked wonders for the band and their US label, Vice. However, it does pose questions about just how far labels will go to keep retail outlets (and non-traditional music sellers in particular) on their side.
There have been many instances of stores getting exclusive sales rights on a particular release or forcing a label to change the artwork on a sleeve before it can be racked. But Bloc Party's extra tracks fandango could well set an example other on-the-cusp indie acts will emulate.
As the number of sales required to get a significant chart entry diminish, there's every chance that more and more acts will try this scam for size and squeeze fans for every cent in the process.
While it's unlikely that Bloc Party will able to repeat or main- tain this sales momentum, it
has generated enough media coverage to get them on key TV and radio shows and to jump several rungs on the ladder. For them, this end justifies the means. Other acts may reason that "doing a Bloc Party" will do them no harm either.
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