“Iggy Azalea has joined the Beatles in the music record books,” screamed the headlines this week.
“Australian rapper Iggy Azalea has scored a United States chart double only previously achieved by The Beatles, with her debut hits sitting at number one and number two.” wrote the ABC.
What a load of rubbish. Comparing the chart position of Iggy Azelea to what the Beatles achieved is farcical beyond belief.
“Comparing apples to oranges” comes to mind.
It is now possible to have a hit song in America without selling a single copy. Billboard now bases its Hot 100 on airplay and YouTube views as much as it does sales. A song that gets a lot of airplay or watched many times on YouTube can make the Billboard chart without a single sale.
Billboard now values 64 streams as equal to one download sale. Iggy Azalea ‘Fancy’ has generated 63,750,656 YouTube views. According to the rules of today that alone equals 996,104 sales.
Saying Iggy Azalea’s 996,104 streams makes her equal in success to The Beatles is just plain ludicrous.
So now lets make apples equal apples by applying the same courtesy to the Beatles and including the “stream of the time”, television to their figures. I’ll use The Beatles appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 as an example.
An estimated 74 million people tuned in to watch The Ed Sullivan Show on the night of the Beatles appearance. The Beatles performed ‘All My Loving’, ‘Till There Was You’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and ‘I Want To Hold You Hand’ on the show that night.
By applying the same calculation to The Beatles (ie: 64 views equals one sale) then by today’s rules The Beatles had the Top 5 songs that day with approximately 1,156,250 sales each based on their television views.
The population of the USA in 1964 was 191,888,791 compared to 318,127,000 today. By weighting the Ed Sullivan views to todays population increase increases the Beatles stats by +66%. To really compare apples with apples, The Beatles views weighted to todays population would equal 1,919,375 sales per song.
Iggy Azelea ‘Fancy’ has sold 1.3 million downloads since it was released in February compared to our apples with apples scenario of 1.9 million “sales” in one day for each of the five songs.
The Iggy headline gets even more ridiculous because the Top song ‘Problem’ only has Azalea as a featured artist. It is not her song. It is by Ariana Grande. Therefore the claim that she has the Top two songs in the USA is false. She has the number two song and features on the number one song.
Also lets factor in the disposable “turn the tap and download a song for 99c” model of today compared to 1964 when to own music you had to physically leave your house, go to the store and make a purchase.
There is no sane comparison that can be made for the purchase of Beatles music to that of Iggy Azalea. But as The Beatles publicist Derek Taylor once told me “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”.
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