Hot Take: I don't really care about physical sales anymore. It mattered more in the pre digital age.
I go back and forth on this. My hot take is, idc about streaming figures bc it's all so nebulous (to me!). Someone picks a random number of streams and decides that is equivalent to x number of sales. And then the figure is changed. And then it gets changed again. One country includes radio play, another one doesn't. It's all meaningless, really. Plus, people streaming stuff for hours while they do other stuff? I know they have to engage more, now, and have a proper playlist so as to avoid the whole 'bot' thing but it still seems weird to me.
That said, when I see data for Invincible / Essential / Number Ones I do get madly excited, especially if the figures are for the UK. Or I get excited just bc it's so nice to see Michael still popping up in these charts but then I don't compare him to other legacy artists so I don't really know what it means. Elton John has got more monthly listeners on Spotify, iirc, but that's as much as I know.
But even then it was,, never actually a perfect measurement?
Sadly, it would seem so. That said, it still rests on something tangible. If the sales were estimated based on shipping figures that still proves that a decent number of physical items were bought - even if some stock was left in storage somewhere not all of it would have been. Streaming something (often for free or for a tiny amount of money - does anyone even care about artists' royalties?) is very different to physically travelling to a record shop and putting down hard cash. It's just not the same thing.
Not really any different than streaming and the music videos
Just so massively different I don't even know where to start, lol. The record you want is out of stock? Oh, you'll have to come back
next week! And we did.
I pay more attention to those statistics.
I don't usually pay attention to the actual stats but I do like to see Michael in a chart alongside Tyler, the Creator or Taylor Swift or whoever. I just find that so cool. He doesn't have any new products out. He's not around to tour, be on social media, do interviews or any of that. But he's still in the mix. With stuff like the Thriller Challenge to get a billion views for Thriller, it's more that I love the dedication and persistence of Michael's fans. I'll post stuff for that but it's more of a salute to his fans.
I've posted this before:
From a 1977 bio of Elvis, page 70 - 71:
"Fan clubs for Elvis at the same time were organised throughout the country with membership cards. The instructions to Elvis Fan Club members read: 'To be members in good standing each week you must send out five postcards to a disc jockey in your vicinity, and follow it up with ten phone calls a week to the radio stations, demanding Elvis' records.'
"Girls formed Elvis Presley clubs of their own which met at their various homes for Elvis - record sessions. They would scream and cry at every record with over-wrought emotions."
(The quotes are included in - 'Elvis: Lonely Star At The Top' by David Hanna - but originally come from a book by May Mann called The Private Elvis).
Here endeth my TED talk!