Thankfully yeah. "Hits" have never meant much. I just find the sale numbers quite shocking
To elaborate, let's take this little factoid as an example:
Ke$ha’s single ‘Tik-Tok’ has sold more copies than any Beatles single. Many wouldn’t even call ‘Tik-Tok’ music, but obviously enough people went out to buy it for it to overtake sales of any Beatles song.
True, but a number of things do not justify this comparison. To narrow things down, let's compare
Tik-Tok with
Hey Jude which is the biggest-selling Beatles single, with 8 million sales, whereas
Tik-Tok sold 14 million times.
Hey Jude was released in 1968,
Tik-Tok in 2009. That's 41 years in between, which really is a lot of time. The problem we are facing is, that all we are doing is comparing absolute numbers. But it's the circumstances that produced these numbers that warrant attention if we are to evaluate the meaning of this factoid. Let's star with the very basics: In 1968, the world population was around 3.5 billion people, in 2009, it was at 7 billion
. In other words, it doubled in that time frame. If we took that as an indicator for the possible audience that would buy the singles, it would mean that that also doubled - but actually, it increased by far more. In 1968, the market for pop music as played by The Beatles was the western world: Western Europe (politically speaking), North America, South Africa, the Antipodes and Japan. Those were the only countries relevant to the sales for a Beatles record. Moreover, if I may trust what my parents told me, money did not sit overly loose in those days. You would consider several times to buy a record, especially if someone of your friends already had it, and it was on the radio all the time anyway. Maybe by 1968, that was not so much a concern for adults, but it was for kids. Under those circumstances, 8 million sales is a bloody incredible achievement.
Tik-Tok was released in 2009, as a digital single. I don't know how much of its sales were for the download and how much for the CD single, but my guess is that sales for the download outweighed the CD sales by far. As such, it was available to anyone who had an internet access anywhere in the world, which 2.4 billion people had at the time. National boundaries didn't matter, nor did import policies. You could buy the song in America, Russia, China, Egypt, Brazil or India. Buying it was a lot simpler than going down to the store, finding the record in hope it was not sold out and putting the money on the counter. With mobile applications, that song was available to buy anywhere. You clicked, and for maybe 99 cents it was yours. Many people, especially kids, have that sort of money readily available for purchases like these (and even if they don't, they often make them). A week later it was already lost somewhere in the portable hard drives and forgotten about. By those standards, I really don't think that 14 million is such an impressive number. It's a lot, sure, but methinks we'll see plenty of such numbers in the future (and actually, we
already do).
Also, I think the popularity of Beatles songs should not be measured by the chart performance of singles. If you take into account the sales of the many reissues and compilations that have been released over the years, that's where the meat is. Everybody has a Beatles compilation at home. It's not always the same one, but everybody has those songs in some form.
Hey Jude has been played constantly in the radio for forty years now and will be played for the decades to come. I don't remember the last time I heard
Tik-Tok anywhere.
Poor them!
