Like music? Like geeky data? Of course you do – it’s The Afterword! So I can safely predict you will like this video of “Timeline history of most popular music artists from 1969 to 2019 ranked by yearly certified record sales. Numbers are worldwide and adjusted to twelve months trailing average.”
And there’s much more from the same person, in the same mesmerising style. Enjoy.
A few surprises there for me. A fairly brief entry for U2 and none at all for REM. Guns&Roses were much more popular for much longer than I realised. Ditto Metallica. Also, I am totally detached from what people are actually listening to today (or indeed, this decade).
I was surprised not to see the Stones at all until they very briefly skated across the bottom of the chart some time in the early Eighties.
1, I am dismayed that I’ve never even heard of 2 of the world’s 4 best-selling artists currently, namely BTS and Luis Fonsi.
2. Around mid-2005, there appears to be a fall in the house of Usher. Arf arf!
and who (or what) is Drake?
Me know nothing …
Same here. But at least we now know when.
You really don’t know who Drake is?
I know Charlie Drake.
I know who Charlie Drake is
(am I close?)
Rigid, we are so synched.
We are about to enter the Twilight Zone
Do do do do ….
“Drake” is ubiquitous here in Canada (and the US), not sure about rest of the world. Last year he beat The Beatles record having 7 hits simultaneously in the US top 10.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/news/drake-beats-huge-chart-record-set-beatles/
He’s also well known as being the “biggest fan” of the Toronto Raptors (that’s a basketball team), that earlier this year became the first non US team to win the NBA championship.
I had no idea there was an artist named after British Tome Stores.
Just saw this and about to add this to the blog! It is indeed very Afterword! I was waiting for Bowie to appear – no show. I suppose you have to be huge in the States to get a foothold on this. There were a couple I’d never even heard of!
Round about 2007 I realised I’d never heard anything by anyone in the top 10.
Round about 2017 I realised I’d never even heard of half of the top 10
Also a reminder of how awful the 90s were – Dion, Houston, Twain, Brooks, Carey
Elton held up we’ll though, didn’t he?
So the real British invasion of radio-friendly unit shifters happened very recently in the shape of 1D, Sheeran and Adele.
Other than them the Brits to make it really big are exactly those you would expect: HJHs, Queen, Zep, Mac, Floyd, Elton and George Michael with surprisingly brief entry for Coldplay and a blink and you’ll miss it from Clapton and the Stones.
The 90s really were a wasteland for UK acts breaking the states. We were all off our faces clubbing!
Did I miss any other Brits? The 1980s ‘British invasion’ was not actually a big thing we can conclude apart from George (though I don’t think Wham made it).
I don’t remember seeing The Police in the video. I would have expected them to be up there in the early 80s.
Phil Collins was in there with a really weird icon.
That would be his face.
What compelling viewing that was! A few things of note…
The Eagles – there’s no accounting for taste is there.
Michael Jackson owned the 80s didn’t he. I remember the 80s for the big 4 of Jackson, Madonna, Springsteen and Prince, so it was reassuring to see them as the top 4 for much of the decade, although I was slightly surprised how well Prince did and how early his big sales started.
It all started going wrong in the 90s, when some right old rubbish started selling big, although you have to take your hat off to Elton John, topping the charts decades apart. I guess that Diana’s death had something to do with it, but it was probably the Greatest Hits package at the time that sold big.
Oasis, biggest band in the world in the 90s…not!
Eminem surprised me too. A long period of dominance, although the hip hop big sellers that followed him were almost all a bit rubbish.
I was surprised not to see either Adele or Ed Sheeran top the charts.
There were other things I thought of too. Should have written them down. The lack of Dylan, the poor showing for Bowie, Pink Floyd not hitting the top and the ridiculous figures in the 21st century – presumably downloads and streams. And plenty of artists towards the end that I’d never heard of. Fab viewing though. I started a ‘biggest acts in the world timeline’ thread many moons ago and I know the one that I put forward looked nothing like the one I watched in the video. I got The Beatles in the 60s right and that’s about it.
Don’t think Dylan ever sold in massive quantities. Probably the odd one now and again selling a few million and that’s it.
A reminder that who we think of mainstream here is not actually that mainstream out there. Celine Deon and Garth Brooks threads anyone?
and Billy Joel was remarkably consistent – he made that number 8 spot pretty much his own for a good few years
I love The Eagles. They are an easy target for a lazy cheap laugh, and I’m not really sure why. It must be the result of some rather poisonous hindsight mockery in the wake of the ubiquity of Hotel California. How old were you when their first few albums came through?
Eagles, no “The”
Bland 70s type stuff, guess I was too young
Ah, I actually quite liked The Eagles. They were an instrumental band from Bristol, I think. My dad had an album of theirs called Smash Hits By The Eagles that I used to enjoy playing as a kid, Sukiyaki being my favourite. Having only been a kid through the seventies, and therefore not being familiar with Eagles, when I did hear Hotel California and start to learn they were a big band, it was a while before I discovered that the two weren’t one and the same. I think I even tried comparing the photo on the album sleeve with a picture of Eagles from my Guinness Book of British Hit Albums book, trying to work out who was who, now they’d all grown their hair long and grown droopy moustaches!
Ha ha, brilliant.
I was 21-22 when their first couple of albums surfaced. Was not impressed and still am not. A few odd tracks are quite likeable but I’ve never been tempted to buy anything of theirs, listen to them on Spotify etc. Wallpaper music.
I love The Eagles as well.
Great music that will last.
Well I very much enjoyed that, but… I’d have to raise an eyebrow at some things:
– The graph didn’t demonstrate any dropping off of sales figures after 2001-2, the great Napster music biz collapse. If anything, figures increased. So I’m assuming they’re following some metric of streaming = sales, hence the dominance of Drake and RhiRhi at the end, with much higher numbers than we see in the heyday of record sales.
– I’m amazed at how Presley kept selling records
– The Beatles: I expected a reappearance in 1996 as the Anthology was a huge seller, and the biggest selling physical album of the noughties, was the 1 compilation, yet nary a ripple. Found that odd.
– Seemed very US centric.
But I really enjoyed it! Great stuff.
I would say ‘peak-centric’ as well. I was baffled by the exclusion of Bob Marley – but he’s sold steadily over decades, whereas Nirvana who have sold less had a very clear peak. The Doors, Tom Petty and Johnny Hallyday have (perhaps) sold more than Usher, but he packed his sales into a couple fo years as opposed to decades.
oops rewatched and Doors do make it at the end of the 60s
Absolutely fascinating stuff, thanks! Madge appeared as if from nowhere and shot straight to pole position.
I’m expecting Adele to be riding high again this last quarter, once her new album is unleashed.
Very clear and rapid disappearance of young Mister Jackson after a period of phenomenal popularity.
His other videos are in much the same vein, but I couldn’t watch any of them ‘cos he seems to only have the one backing track, which I last heard between the 17th and 125th floor of a building in Dullsville.
The rise and fall of Psy was pretty brutal.
If you’re going to be a one hit wonder, that’s the way to do it though.
May I confess that the apparent phenomenon of Lil Wayne entirely passed me by? Not just as in, ‘Well I’ve heard of Jay Z …’, but as in ‘I swear I’ve never heard that name before in my life’?
As a hip hop fan, I would advise you not to bother investigating him further. Lil Wayne isn’t my cup of tea at all. There’s one or two half decent tracks, but that’s the kind of rap music I’m just not bothered about.
I enjoyed the video, but it would’ve been nice if it had begun a little earlier than 1969.
If it had started, say, in the 1560s, then we could’ve seen Thomas Tallis and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina battling it out for the top spot …
Aerosmith then?….
What surprised me watching the ebb and flow was that Elvis was selling so well in the years immediately prior to his death. I was a child at the time but I always had the impression that he was a rather naff has-been by the seventies and his sales only picked up following an industry-fuelled nostalgia tsunami after his death..
Likewise it seems to contradict the common theory that Queen were in the doldrums and then revivified by LiveAid in 1985.
That jars with me too. I remember The Works doing well, I Want To Break Free and Radio Ga Ga huge hits, and of course the oldies like Bo Rap and We Will Rock You were very often on the radio.
Live Aid probably did a good job of reintroducing them to US audiences, which for some reason is always considered to be the important thing.
Queen had stopped touring two years before Live Aid and did solo albums.
The Works was a flop in the US due to that cross-dressing video, and their shows in Sun City did for the US/UK tour, so they toured Rio, Australia and Japan instead.
They started touring again soon after Live Aid, for a year, until Freddie’s illness put the brakes on again.
Was the Sun City thing mentioned in the Bo Rhap film?
(I forgets – I don’t recall it)
Not that I remember.
Yeah, Elvis really surprised me as well.
Presumably it’s partly explained by the the fact that there are a *lot* of Elvis albums?