Spotify app behind classical album's 50% iTunes sales hike

One classical music record label has credited its Spotify app with a 50 per cent increase in its iTunes sales.

The label in question, X5, created a Spotify app called Classify which makes the confusing world of classical music easier for the uninitiated to navigate.

In the month after the app went live, streams of The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music went up by 412 per cent, a fact that X5 credits with the jump in iTunes sales.

"People use the Spotify free service as a discovery tool and then go to iTunes for buying their music," said X5's CEO Johan Lagerlof.

"The recent sales spike for 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music follows the same trend we have seen in Sweden, where there is a positive correlation between Spotify streaming and digital sales."

The sounds of science

But that's not to say that you can just throw together a Spotify app then sit back and watch the iTunes sales come rolling in.

We're not convinced that other albums in X5's catalogue will do quite as well as The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music, which promises to fill the classical music void in your life with 50 pieces you already recognise and quite like, but never knew what they were called.

But evidence that people who stream music also go on to buy said music is always a good thing – and, not that we want to equate music streaming with piracy, but studies have shown that pirates actually spend the most on music too. So try before you buy works - who'd have thunk?

From TechCrunch