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The album campaign has leveraged the band’s charisma via every available channel.

MIDNIGHT MANIA

One Direction’s Big Rollout

Midnight Memories, the new release from SYCO/ Columbia’s One Direction, debuted at #1 on the HITS Album Sales Chart this week with 530k, powered by a multi-faceted campaign by Rob Stringer’s Columbia team.

"It’s a really good record, and they are growing up beautifully," Stringer told HITS in a recent interview. "They feel like a crossover band now." Midnight finds the band expanding their stylistic reach with rock guitars and other new elements while refining their mastery of mainstream Pop.

The album campaign, meanwhile, has leveraged the band’s charisma via every available channel.

The group cannily employed social media to amp up anticipation for the release. They unveiled the title via an Instagram clip of 1D’s Harry Styles rearranging letters to spell it out, while the track list was parceled out via a quiz on Twitter.

Single "Story of My Life" quickly became a sales story, earning gold certification in just four weeks. The track hit #19 on the Mediabase Top 40 chart in its third week, and has reached a total audience of 102m. "The new song is getting radio in places it’s never been before," Stringer points out.

The "Story" video, meanwhile, has scared up nearly 64m VEVO views. The cheeky clip for prior single "Best Song Ever," featuring the members in disguise as their showbiz alter egos, has racked up more than 173m views.

An 11/25 iHeartRadio album release party at Clear Channel’s swanky new iHeartRadio Theater in L.A. aired on 90+ Clear Channel Pop stations, was streamed on Yahoo and will be broadcast on the CW network on 12/9.

"1D Day" offered a seven-hour live stream on 11/23, with 1m catching the stream live and another 3m+ viewing it within 24 hours.

The band performed on The X Factor (11/17), The American Music Awards (11/24, when they snagged Best Pop/Rock Album and Favorite Pop/Rock Band) and Good Morning America (11/25), and are slated to play on Saturday Night Live on 12/7.

The GMA appearance saw the group announce its 2014 "Where We Are" North American tour, which kicks off in Toronto on 8/1 and concludes on 10/5 in Miami; tickets go on sale on 12/7 via LiveNation.com.

Columbia also partnered with IPG Media Lab for a 1D initiative via mobile-messaging tool Kik, whereby fans can chat with one another about the band and unlock exclusive content, including videos, photos and social-media news.

Midnight Memories hit #1 at iTunes as a pre-order and, with 200k+ across all e-tail stores, shattered the record for pre-release digital sales previously held by Justin Timberlake. Both the deluxe and standard editions hit the upper reaches of the download emporium’s album chart.

With Midnight’s chart debut, it’s clear that this erstwhile "boy band" has matured into a mainstay on the Pop landscape.

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