Netflix M?tley Crüe Film ‘The Dirt’ Pumps Up Band’s Music Sales
While Netflix holds viewership figures for its films close to the vest, the band M?tley Crüe is feeling the positive effects of the hellraising band’s biopic The Dirt. Its music catalog is soaring as a result of the film.
Streaming partners have stepped up to support the film’s soundtrack, and M?tley Crüe’s catalog with the Global Marquee feature on Spotify and Apple Music building a dedicated M?tley Super Room. The payback was instant, with a 570% stream increase on Spotify, a 900% stream increase on Apple Music and Apple iTunes downloads growing by 2,027%. Amazon, with triple-digit streaming growth, is benefitting from sales of the biography, which jumped back to No. 1 music book, and M?tley’s Deezer streams are up 669%.
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The band reports that the M?tley Essentials playlist now is charting higher than Drake Essentials on Apple Music. The effect is being felt globally in 150 markets with top 10 iTunes charts around the world. The film got an 85% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, on par with Bohemian Rhapsody’s 87%.
On the music side, The Dirt soundtrack on M?tley Records and Eleven Seven Music immediately reached No. 1 on the iTunes All Genres Chart and currently stands at No. 4 US and No. 5 worldwide. The band’s Greatest Hits album currently stands at No. 2 in the US on iTunes and at No. 11 worldwide. The soundtrack features four new songs including the first single, “The Dirt (Est. 1981) (feat. Machine Gun Kelly)” and their unlikely cover of Madonna’s Like a Virgin. In addition, Spotify garnered an eightfold increase in daily streams, from roughly 400,000 to 3.6 million, and still increasing.
The book was written by band member Nikki Sixx, who hopes to use the message of the film to draw attention to the USA’s opioid crisis. A recovering addict himself, the bass player has established a music program for kids at Covenant House in Los Angeles and is instrumental in drawing attention to the root causes of addiction. A personal mission, Sixx is collaborating with the U.S. Surgeon General to fight opioid addiction and will bring his best-selling Heroin Diaries book to life with a musical of the same name, due to debut in 2019 with partners including Live Nation Ticketmaster, Eleven Seven, Scott Borchetta and Downtown Music.
Said Sixx: “In the film we show painful examples of domestic violence, DUI, manslaughter, drug overdose and the loss of a child. We couldn’t possibly have crammed everything from a 430-page book into an hour-and-50-minute movie, but we felt we achieved our objective of showing the downside of sex, drugs and rock and roll.”
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