‘Dune’ Trailer Helps Young Music Fans Discover One of Rock’s Most Popular Albums
It was a match made in soundtrack heaven: The new trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming adaptation of Dune — one of the most popular sci-fi novels ever — deploying a rearranged version of Pink Floyd’s “Eclipse,” the closing track from one of the most popular rock albums ever, The Dark Side of the Moon.
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While one would assume the core audience of science fiction-loving classic rock fans would largely already overlap, a tabulation of the “Eclipse” streaming numbers following the Dune trailer premiere suggests that The Dark Side of the Moon — already 15x platinum in the U.S. and over 45 million copies sold worldwide — might have been discovered by a whole new audience.
After the Dune trailer premiered September 9th, on-demand audio streams Pink Floyd’s “Eclipse” increased by 50 percent, while digital sales of the song soared 1,750 percent, according to Alpha Data, the analytics provider that powers the IndieLand Charts.
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The added attention on Dark Side’s closing track also had a residual effect on the album’s preceding songs, with streams for the classic 1973 LP increasing by 12 percent over the previous day.
And data shows that many of the listeners were new to the 43rd Greatest Album of All Time. On Spotify — where “Eclipse” streams were up 54 percent on a whole — “Eclipse” witnessed an 86 percent influx of users listening to the track for the first time on September 9th.
The bulk of those discoveries, Spotify noted, were streamed by millennials: While Dune and Dark Side are worshipped by boomers and Generation X, the 1973 LP was perhaps relegated to “that record in every dad’s collection” among younger music fans.
Just as the casting of actor Timothée Chalamet has helped expose a new demographic to author Frank Herbert’s 400-page novel about an interstellar power struggle revolving around “the spice,” “Eclipse” felt a similar impact on Spotify: Streams of the song were up 75 percent among 25-to-29-year-old listeners, while “Eclipse” saw a 65 percent increase in the 18-24 age group. Additionally, in programmed streams, Pandora reported a 200 percent increase in listeners starting an “Eclipse” station.
However, Dune hasn’t provided as much a boost for Dark Side of the Moon’s enduring legacy as the total solar eclipse did in August 2017: In the aftermath of “The Great American Eclipse,” streams for “Eclipse” jumped 460 percent percent over the previous, non-eclipsed day.
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