If you’re currently in a room with four people, chances are at least one of them listened to U2 on iTunes last month. That person may have even been you.
British market research firm the Kantar Group has announced a new independent study that reveals that U2 accounted for 23 percent of all music listened on iOS devices throughout January 2015, and of that group, 95 percent listened to at least one new track off U2’s Songs of Innocence. Those are pretty pretty healthy figures, especially when factoring there are more than 400 million users worldwide.
And U2’s success is lapping the competition, as their figure tops the combined totals of the second and third place artists, Taylor Swift (11 percent) and Katy Perry (8 percent), respectively.
Says Bono in a presser: “This is fantastic news. If these figures suggest that these songs still matter to people, then we’re knocked out. That’s all any songwriter wants.”
A lot of this has to do with U2’s latest album, Songs of Innocence, which in September 2014 was uploaded into everyone’s iTunes whether they wanted it or not. According to Kantor, 95 percent of the U2 listenership “listened to one or more tracks from the band’s current album,” so it’s not like these numbers are being held up by Achtung Baby or The Joshua Tree.
So naturally, U2 are declaring their Songs of Innocence experiment a grand success.
“It’s nice to know that 5 months on so many people have discovered Songs of Innocence,” says the Edge in the same presser. “In the end we just wanted people to hear the album. We took a big risk but today we can say that the experiment worked.”