Dry your eyes now. You can’t say Coldplay didn’t give us ample warning. “We are only going to do 12 proper albums and that’s real,” the English rock band’s singer Chris Martin told Apple Music this week: a shock revelation that had music lovers feverishly counting on their fingers.

This music lover was, I confess, inconsolable. It means that after Moon Music lands today (October 4), we’re due for two more serves of their insufferable bombast and mewling, lasting until 2030. But haters gonna hate, as another popular stadium shaker (11 proper albums and counting) memorably surmised.

For Coldplay’s millions of fans, the news is much better. Martin’s bid to become rock’s Quentin Tarantino (nine proper movies down, one to go) makes all kinds of sense in a market that prefers your old stuff with increasing ardour, opting as years roll by for the “improper” likes of hits compilations and classic-album repackages.

Consider, as Martin did, the perennial touchstone of the Beatles. Looking back from here, their 11 or 13 albums – depending on what you consider proper – define a perfectly glorious arc: hardly flawless, but rendered whole and unassailable by the fact that they stopped making them.

The eternally Rolling Stones, not so much. Fans tend to favour the Brian Jones years, or the late ’60s/early ‘70s sprint from Beggars Banquet to Exile on Main St. But the Stones’ set lists are tellingly unconcerned today with anything much after album 14 – or maybe 16: there’s too much impropriety to count with those guys.

Of the other all-time king-hitter boy bands, Pink Floyd enjoyed a mostly stellar 11-album run up to and including The Wall, then rancour, derision and greatest-hits tours thereafter. Led Zeppelin peaked at six, those last three albums invariably ranked as OK or worse.

Fast forwarding to other man-gangs that Coldplay have cited as inspirational, only the Smiths managed to bow out with dignity after four albums. REM and U2 will be charitably remembered for 10 proper albums and a downward spiral of five footnotes. If Radiohead never make a 10th, fans can rest assured they’ve heard nothing but their best. Oasis managed only two before succumbing to turgid repetition.

On this evidence, Martin’s assertion that “quality control” fades around the dozen-album mark is generous to the point of clear-and-present peril for a band that’s taken twice or three times as long to get there as any of those named above. Which leads to the other stated reason for Coldplay’s sensible retirement plan. “I want to give the [other members] some of their life for themselves,” their leader magnanimously told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe: surely sensitive new age rock star’s code for: “Listen, I’ve had it up to here with this gig.”