‘Weird Al’ Yankovic dominates Spotify’s viral track charts

There’s nothing odd about it -- “Weird Al” Yankovic’s new album dominated Spotify’s most-shared track charts in its first week in release.

Globally and in the U.S., songs from the pop music parodist’s “Mandatory Fun” currently hold four of the five most-viral tracks counted by the Stockholm-based on-demand streaming service, according to data released Wednesday.

The streaming figures follow the announcement that “Mandatory Fun” -- featuring parodies of Robin Thicke, Lorde and Pharrell Williams -- has hit the top of Billboard’s album chart, selling more than 104,000 copies during the week that ended Sunday. That marks Yankovic’s first No. 1 album, and the first comedy record to earn the top spot since 1963.

“Mandatory Fun’s” rollout generated a huge amount of buzz on the Web.

For the campaign, the comic musician teamed with online video destinations such as Nerdist, Funny or Die and College Humor to unveil eight music videos over eight days. The video for “Word Crimes,” a linguistically adept version of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” has been viewed well more than 10 million times on YouTube.

On Spotify, “Mandatory Fun” was streamed more than 2.18 million times around the world last week. Counting plays of songs from his older material, streams of Weird Al’s music surpassed 3.28 million for the week, an increase of 785% from the week before the new album became available.

Notably, the Weird Al track that got the most shares was “NOW That’s What I Call Polka!,” the latest of Yankovic’s oom-pah-infused pop song medleys -- which was not included in the video blitz.

The songs also earned top spots on Spotify’s viral charts for multiple non-U.S. countries including Britain, Australia and Sweden.

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